The capacitors take a really long time to drain. It's probably not dangerous, but resist the urge to stick your tongue in there until the voltmeter reads zero.

Once I knew it was working, I couldn't resist the urge to check out the amperage the laptop pulls. Big noises have been made about how Sagers draw power like a desktop unit. I wired everything up, and when I plugged it in to the (off) laptop, this is what I got. It takes about 2 amps just to charge the battery. The power supply is rated for 6 amps, so that leaves just four to run things.

This is at the windows desktop, once the hard drive has settled down (but is still running. Not bad, really, for a CPU, LCD screen, and spinning drive, given that the battery is still being charged. But what about more strenuous conditions?

I used the industry standard power supply load testing benchmark, Hamsterball. This pushed things right up to the limit and pretty much kept them there.

However, if you're anything like me, you immediately start to wonder what happens if you plug in a couple of USB peripherals like a mouse and keyboard, drive an external monitor, and fire up 3DMark2003. The results are not pretty.

That's driving the power supply way past its 6 amp peak rating, and about 10% over its overall watts rating (132W vs 120W). With more demanding USB peripherals, I'm pretty confident I could get this to go higher. The overwattage makes it get extremely hot, and it will shorten the life of the unit in a way that can't be fixed by referring to a quasi-witty webpage with lots of pictures. Gaming while you charge your Sager's batteries will probably shorten the life of your power supply. That's not a joke. Even if the wiring situation were totally acceptable and not a fire hazard, Sager/Clevo should probably get thumped but good for selling their equipment with inadequete power supplies. (And one needs only perform a cursory search of notebookforums.com to see that fried power supplies are a fairly common Sager complaint.) That's the kind of thing auto makers issue recalls over.

Anyway, to solve my problem, I needed to reconnect the wires in a permanent fashion. Due to the double layering of the cord, the positive wire doesn't have independent insulation. That's why they used heat shrink tubing, but it leaves me with a problem. Since the white wire is inside the black one, it necessarily has to be longer than the black (otherwise it'd be inside where you can't get to it). To solve, this, I elected to leave the black wire that was already soldered to the power supply, but I desoldered the white one (the short chunk shown). I soldered the white wire from the cord onto the power supply, then soldered the black wire from the powersupply to the surrounding wire on the cord. And then, yes, I used heat shrink tubing because it's the best you can do in this situation. Sorry for the cruddy picture. Trying to photograph shiny things with a flash again.

By cleverly reversing the steps I used to disassemble the unit. I was able to reassemble it. Now, there's no way to tell my power supply from yours except that my cord is maybe two inches shorter. Oh yeah, and the missing bits of supersonic flying plastic.

In the long run, I will probably duct tape a loop of cord to the brick, because there is absolutely nothing to keep this from happening again. But for now, this power supply has been saved and maybe yours can be too.

The pinouts for the four-prong power cord, by the way, are awfully simple, as evidenced by the fact that they're fed by just two wires. The out rim and the two closer-together pins in the bottom row are all wired together as +20V. The two farther-apart pins in the top row are wired together as 0V. Seems like an expensive connector for not doing anything actually useful.

Now that I know what I know, I'm contemplating building a 180W power supply, which would be much quieter, much cooler-running, and able to power pretty much whatever I need my Sager to do. I think it'd be pretty costly, though, and a lot of work, so I may not bother. After all, we established early on that I'm both cheap and lazy.