Sunday, September 11, 2016

Ridiculously different power plugs

One of the things that I absolutely hate are devices that have some non-standard power plug jack. I've got this chumby one that takes 5 volts but it has the weirdest little power plug. I wish manufacturers would just use regular plugs that you can easily get a replacement ac adapter for.

There are reasons for using a strange plug, like people plugging in 12V power supplies to a 5V input, but I always check before I would do that. A little labeling goes a long way.

At least you could give me the inner and outer diameters of the plug on the label, for instance.

I did find a plug that would sort of work, but it isn't the right outer diameter so it loses proper connection with the slightest bump.

Some of the worst offenders in this regard are older LCD monitors. Why, why, why use such funny power plugs on the 12V adapter bricks. Can't we just standardize things? I was really glad when they went away from using power bricks to just integrating the power supply on the monitor and using the regular 3 plug AC cord.

And don't get me started on external cd/dvd rom drives. They often use a keyed plug but if there's a different way to wire 4 or 5 pins, they will use all possible permutations. Some of the power bricks have labels that say what pins are what voltage, but the drives don't have such corresponding information. So if you mix up your AC adapters...

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