Dell Power Adapter for Overseas Use

[dave8624]

Hi,

I have a Dell XPS M1530. I will be travelling in Asia the summer and was wondering if the adapter that came with my laptop will work over there. Looking at 3rd party sellers (as Dell doesn't list this info), they say the input voltage is 90-264v Does this mean it will work on a 220v wall socket? I tried that last summer with a Lenovo 3000 and fried the adapter (lol) so I'm trying to avoid this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[mattwathen]

I lived in Germany for about 5 years and this is what I know...
The voltage is in fact somewhere around 230V but your adapter can't simply be switched over. Here in the united states, the frequency of the power is regulated at 60Hz. I don't know what the actual amperage of the power grid over there is, but I do know it's much higher. Whenever I wanted to power something, I had to use this kind of box the military gave us, it would plug into the wall and act like an extension cord, but it had US power outlets on the output The box converted the voltage and power from the European standard to ours.

Again, don't try to use your adapter straight out! Get a travel power adapter for general use, or see if your laptop has an overseas adapter available for it. Either way, you'll need something to convert the power.

Hope this helps!

 

[meinsla]

May work, may not. I deployed to Kuwait (220V I think it is) and had nothing but issues with mine. About 90-95% of the time when trying to run off AC power I get the message "Your AC power adaptor cannot be determined. Your computer will run slowly and battery will not charge." And believe me it does run quite slowly. I haven't figured out why my computer sometimes will have no issues with the power and sometimes it won't. I understand the power here probably isn't very stable so maybe you'll have better luck than me. I've tried voltages converters and step-down transformers with no luck (even though, according to the power adapter itself, I shouldn't need it use anything like that). I believe my problem may be current, not voltage. Though, I know little about this kind of stuff.

All I know is my power house of a computer is virtually useless for gaming because of this, because every time it is unable to charge it runs too slow to play many of my games at a semi-decent framerate.