Am I overloading my laptop's power supply?

[tundrawolf86]

Hey, I have an Acer Aspire 7551-7422 17.3 inch laptop. I have made several upgrades and have a large number of drives plugged in, namely:

- doubled the ram from 4 gb to 8 gb
- replaced the hard drive with an ssd, put the old hard drive in an enclosure, and plugged it in as an external drive

- put an SD card into the card reader
- plugged in a second external hard drive

- plugged in 3 flash drives
- plugged in mini/micro usb cables for use with other devices (tablet, smartphone, TI-89, gps)

I have my system set to "performance" battery settings, and I have a 24" LED monitor plugged in, which presumably stresses the GPU and requires more power.

Am I destroying my laptop's power supply? Is there anything inherently wrong with keeping so many USB devices plugged in permanently? I even want to add a bluetooth card to the mpcie slot, remove the optical drive and put a hard drive in the optical bay, and use the removed DVD drive externally in a USB enclosure.

Should I buy a 9 cell battery, a better power supply, or a UPS or something? Thanks for your help.

 

[Eximo]

Well, a lot of those things are probably running off of the motherboard 5V supply through the USB ports. If you overtax that it could be bad and lead to system failure.

For peace of mind you can purchase a powered USB hub for all of your external devices.

A larger battery would increase runtime, not provide more power.