The OEM has to warranty the laptop so the last thing they are going to do is use a cheap adapter that will fry the laptop (lets not bring up HP here). I own a small PC repair business and I have seen many many laptops (and batteries) destroyed by these generic 'replacement' chargers. Only ever get OEM or the brand that makes the OEM batteries, in the case of ASUS that is Delta.

Now the aftermarket ones can usually be had for 1/3 to 1/2 the price so can be a better buy then OEM (but it is still a risk) In regards to aftermarket batteries, some can be garbage but most will work just fine they do have a quicker decay rate (so if it took 2 years for your OEM to have less charge, then aftermarket might only take 1 to 1-1/2 years). For longest performance, this is usually the best option. OEM is always going to be a known variable because that is what is your laptop came with and you know how it performs. My take on replacement batteries and ac chargers: You can order a new jack on amazon for $5-10, but unless you are very good with soldering iron and desoldering you will need to take it to an electronics repair shop. Like we usually do here at, if we don't give you twice as much review as any other site, we give you twice as many.Without being able to actually inspect your laptop, my thought would be that your DC jack has a small fracture in it (possibly too small to see with untrained eyes). Meet your new sound card: the Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi! Creative developed a whole new processor to power it, the 20K1, sporting 51 million transistors and 10,000 MIPS.ġ0,000 MIPS? What the hell do you do with 10,000 MIPS? If you are Creative you could apply all that power to do sophisticated real time effects with audio streams.

At the top of the list, of course, is the X-Fi. Thumbing through Creative's catalog of products, you can see some of the SoundBlasters of yore, like the SoundBlaster 16, still for sale. Back in the virtual world, my reverie gets cut short by an artillery borage.

Oh, Creative has had their competition, but by tooth or by nail, it pretty much owned the entire sound card market since. I knew that for better or worse, Creative was here to stay, and AdLib was their first casualty. Shortly after AdLib put out their card, Creative put out the SoundBlaster and put Adlib out of its misery. Now we have cards with 7.1 channels, 24 bit/96 kHz sampling, 3D positional audio and games that can really use it. It had 2 channel FM synthesis and a meager software bundle. I was playing Battlefield 2 online the other night, testing the X-Fi out and thinking back to playing Wing Commander with the first sound card for the PC, the AdLib. Does anyone out there remember playing Wing Commander without a sound card? Yeah, I'm so old-school that even old-school doesn't have a name for us ( Ed: I think they do, they call you 'old') and games didn't use sound cards.

Sound blaster x fi xtrem audio