Thursday, February 28, 2008

Power conversion; to charge - or not to charge.

Recently we started doing some serious investigation into power converters / adapters. A few facts that we've learned:
  • USA is running at 110/120 voltage
  • Europe is running 220/240 voltage
  • Converters are either made for high voltage items (hair dryers), low voltage items (laptops) or both - but not all are both
  • Converters are not the same as adapters
After looking at my hair dryer and discovering its not dual voltage we realized we're either going to have to buy a new hair dryer or a dual converter in order to use my hair dryer and my laptop while in Scotland. I've found quite a lot of dual converters online - and we purchased one from WalMart for about $20 - a damn good price in comparison to other sites. I found one blog that gave the converter we bought a thumbs up! Then I went onto Amazon and read the comments left by other users - only three reviews and the final count was one 1star, one 2star and one 5star rating. I've decided to return the converter once we get it. But, while I was at Amazon and able to read the reviews I hunted around for another converter. What I found was that every dual converter sold on Amazon has a general 50/50 review (or no review at all). Half say it was great - half say it blew up and stopped working a few hours in.

So what should I do? I don't want to damage my precious, precious laptop with some shotty converter but when all the converters seemed to work well for some and not for others - what do I choose?

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