Electric Shocks from my laptop

October 28, 2005 · 1 min read

Often, when I take my laptop somewhere, it starts stinging me when I place my wrists on the speaker grill, this is the normal position when typing.

Turns out in fact, that I am being electrocuted smile3

And I am not the only one it seems:

http://www.zd7000forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=1294&highlight=skin

_I noticed my laptop also is giving me a shock. I pulled out my handy Fluke 77 Multimeter and got the following:

The Shock is from AC current, not DC.

While there is some DC voltage leaking to ground in the chassis, the vast majority of what everyone is feeling is AC voltage. I mesured Approx 54 Volts on the chassis mounted HW such as external ports and the speaker grill where my hand/arm has worn some of the paint away now. So for fun i decided to check for ampers, I got 48mA. While this is not a great deal of elecricity (enough to kill you) it does make it rather uncomfortable to use the laptop as you have to watch where you rest your arm.

Now since the laptop runs entirely on DC voltage, the AC voltage leak to ground must be from the power inverter, again my multimeter confirmed that in fact the AC voltage leak is on the negative side of the plug not on the positive side. This leads me to believe that the power adapter is bad.

All this information is real nifty except my laptop started shocking me 2 weeks out of warranty and HP really could care. Personally i would consider this a prelude to bigger and better things, including but not limited to: Electricution, fire, data loss, lawsuits, aliens, and the end of life as we know it..._

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Robert Kloosterhuis

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