Huntkey Universal Notebook Adapter (65W)

It’s hard to get excited about laptop power adapters. Without one, however, your fancy piece of tech is just one battery-discharge away from a new life as an overly-complex paperweight.

As something with a long, thin cable designed to anchor a portable object to a decidedly non-portable wall or floor, power adapters are fairly easy to break. It’s all too easy to trip over power cables – damaging the cable or plug in the process. Compact power adapters are also fairly easy to lose – particularly if you travel often, or lug your laptop between offsite meetings every day.

Huntkey’s Universal Notebook Adapter provides a cheap replacement or spare power adapter, at a more affordable price than you’re likely to see for an official spare part. Unlike universal power adapters we’ve looked at in the past, it operates at a single, fixed voltage of 19V. Huntkey suggests this is compatible with laptops that take between 18 and 20V DC (+/-5%). Certainly, don’t try plugging it into anything that expects below 18V, or you risk damaging the laptop. For any gadget that requires more than 20V, you’re more likely to damage the power supply than the laptop, but it’s still not a good idea.

The manual claims compatibility with models from Acer, Asus, Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hitachi, HP, Lenovo, NEC, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and Viewsonic. Ten plugs are provided, along with a table suggesting which plug(s) may suit your make of laptop. The permanent plug on the end of the cable, that connects to any of those ten adapters, is itself compatible with a huge range of laptops, giving you an eleventh option.

Reviewed during our 2011 Ultraportable Laptops roundup, we had a fair selection of laptops to test the adapter against. Apple’s MacBook Air is out, as all of Apple’s laptops use the company’s patented ‘MagSafe’ connector. As Apple does not license the MagSafe technology, aftermarket power supplies aren't available.

The six remaining laptops in our roundup – ultra-portables from Acer, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and MSI – all use 65W or lower power supplies, have input voltages in the 18-20V range, and power connectors that matched one of those provided with the Huntkey universal adapter. The MSI’s compatibility is particularly impressive, as Huntkey don’t mention the brand on the adapter’s packaging or documentation. You may have equal luck with other unlisted brands.

In our lab tests all six models proved fully compatible with the adapter, charging and operating normally. Due to time constraints we weren’t able to fully test the powered-on and powered-off charge times for each of those laptops with the Huntkey versus original adapter. You may find that the replacement adapter results in a slightly longer or shorter charge time than your original. However, expect any variation to be minor (a few minutes, if anything – not an hour or two’s difference).

It’s a nice thin piece of hardware, at just 58 x 119 x 16mm, and weighs just 300 grams (including the detachable figure-8 cable that connects the adapter to the wall socket). This is less than most of our ultra-portable laptops’ adapters weigh, so it really does travel well with netbooks and smaller laptops.

For higher-powered laptops, a 90-watt version is also available. This measures a larger 60 x 134 x 31mm, and weighs around 550 grams including its power cable. It supports a similarly wide range of laptop manufacturers, and ships with eight adapter plugs to fit various models. Like the 65W version we tested with our ultra-portables, it caters only to laptops in the 18-20V DC range.