HP Pavilion DV6000 adapter (charger) repair

Many of my friends have issue with their laptop adapters (charger) including myself, the wire of the adapter gets damaged and it does not supply the required electric power to the laptop. Usually, we try to bend/move the adapters wire to make it work. Sometimes it works but anyway the wire is damaged so you have to buy a new adapter for your laptop. I was also thinking to buy a new adapter for my laptop but then I thought I should try to repair the adapter and I repaired it. Below is the same procedure as I did, the only difference is I repaired both sides of the wire, the connector and the other end which connects to adapter. Procedure shown below was posted Here

Repaired a HP Pavilion DV6000 laptop charger cord over the weekend.  The cord had become frayed extremely bad close to the connector that plugs into the laptop and needed to be replaced.  The job was fairly easy and straightforward, but if you don’t feel comfortable with a soldering iron/gun or electrical jobs in general you may want to leave this to someone else.  But if you aren’t scared to try something new, and let’s face it, you don’t have much to lose at this point if you are reading this, this can be a low-cost quick fix.  Worst possible outcome is you have to buy a new charger cord, which you were probably already planning.  

As always with any tutorial, please proceed with caution and at your own risk, I make no guarantees. Cords can overheat, you could get electrocuted, you could fry your laptop, etc..

Frayed Cord

This picture shows the bad condition of the cord, all I’ve done here was cut the connector off.  You can see how badly the outside wire is frayed.  I think the wire in the white sleeve was still intact but I had to cut all of the bad section out to get to some clean whole wire.

Cord Cleaned Up

I’ve gotten the cord cleaned up and now ready to solder back to the cleaned up connector.  

Just trim all the damaged cord out of the way, strip back the wire jacket to expose a small amount of the center wire that will connect to the center part of the connector.  I left the outside silver wire a little longer in order to reach further up on the side of the connector to avoid having to bend the wire or have a kink in it.  Then twisted the wire to have it all neat and compact.

Cleaned cord w/ old connector

This picture shows the cleaned cord with the original connector.  My local radio shack store didn’t have a new connector so I chose to clean up the original connector to see if it would work, and it worked just fine.  I heated up the solder on the connector and the bits of broken wire came right off.  I then took a small file and cleaned up the leftover bits to make it nice and clean.

HP Cord resoldered to Cleaned connector

Now we have the center wire in the white sleeve soldered to the end of the connector.  I put a small piece of electrical tape around the center wire before I soldered the outside silver wire to keep them separate.  I then clamped the connector and wire back down and soldered the outside wire to the side of the connector.  Be careful how you hold or clamp the connector.  It could get very hot, and it could also warp or break the plastic pieces.

Finished charger cord

I reinstalled the plastic insulator boot around the soldered connections and wrapped it tightly with electrical tape.  I chose white electrical tape (since it stands out more) as sort of a reminder to not snatch and pull on the cord as this is a refurbished job and while it will probably hold for a long time, it would be better not to abuse it.

We Have Power!!

Let everything cool off and sit for a few minutes and then plug it up and see what happens.  Hopefully if everything went well, you now have power.  If not, wiggle the connection around slowly and see if anything happens, if it does come on, you may just have a loose connection and might need to take it apart and recheck everything.  If that doesn’t solve the problem, you might have damaged the connector itself or may have bigger issues.  But I hope you see a power light and the laptop comes right back to life like my example.  Good luck, it was a much cheaper fix than the $80.00 they wanted for a new cord.