Laptop PSU Wiring Question

stacj

Distinguished
Nov 5, 2011
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18,510
Hello everyone.

I have two different HP Pavilion series Laptops and one has a bad power charger and the other has a broken psu plug port. Both of these laptops have been stripped for parts but have enough left to combine together to make a simple home server for myself. It's not worth it to me to buy anything to replace the broken parts, this is just a learning project.

My question relates to the connectors for the psu plug ports. One has a 4-pin connector with the wire colors (from left to right) orange, red, brown and black - and the other is a 5-pin, with colored wires, red, white, gap (no pin or wire), black and yellow. I need to splice the 4-pin wires that belong to the working plug port to the 5-pin wires that connect to the motherboard.

Can I splice and solder these wires together so I can use the functioning charger and plug port? I checked to make sure the voltage requirements were the same but I can't find any information to accurately tell me the proper way to splice the correct colored wires together.

Also, since the laptop only has 2GB RAM and an AMD Dual Core - Can anyone recommend a Windows OS that will not require more than that to operate smoothly but can still work with my existing network that has various Win 7 OS's?

Thanks in advance for any advice!