Thinkpad power supply replacement
Coming back home for Christmas I forgot to bring my power supply for my Thinkpad, which made me very unhappy. Hesitating between not switching my computer on at all (BTW: I forgot my books as well ;-)) and getting an expensive power supply, I come up with a home-grown solution.
Thinkpads are quite power-demanding beasts: the power supply has to deliver as much as 16V DC at 4.5A, which rules out most of the non-impulse power supplies you can get. Also 16V is a bit uncommon for any supplies. Fortunately, I noticed that our hallogen lamp uses a 50W transformer, which was almost ideal for my purposes. So I built a simple rectifier and… voila 
BTW: 4Amps is quite a current so need to make sure that you use proper diodes, large capacitor and thick cables (there’s about 0.5V voltage loss on my cables).
December 30th, 2005 at 8:38 pm
You sir, are insane. I doubt the IBM warranty will cover it when your TP fries
May 25th, 2007 at 3:20 am
I’ve a Thinkpad T43, and me too I lost my power supply. However, I have a left over power supply from a dead Compaq laptop with a 19volts 3.16 amps. You use it on the Thinkpad T43 on an emergency. I brought a after market power supply on e-bay for $20.00 It last 4 months and went death. It also kills my T43 by overheating my lap top.
What do you think, can it use the Compac as replacment without any damage to the Thinkpad T43 , it calls for 16 volts and 4.5 amps
Many Thanks