Fareastdriver
10th Jun 2010, 21:01
In 2004 I went to do some work in China. Whilst I was there a special offer came up with Acer computers. A deal to good to miss I bought a 2500 Travelmate. It was about £400 or so and apart from having an international keyboard was the same as the UK costing a lot more. It worked fine and the Acer agent whom I had bought it off loaded it with English XP3 without all the Chinese add-ons that the local market would get.
When I got back to the UK I could not plug the charger in as in China you have a similar system to Australia, ie 3 bladed angled pins and I did not have an adapter. To save time I cut off the plug and replace it with a UK 3 pin plug. The wiring was easy: brown is live, blue is neutral and green/yellow is earth. Everything fired up and I was happy.
About a month later the computer started rolling, going to random selections and eventually folded. I took it along to a computer whizzkid but he, or I, could not understand the Chinese setup discs to restore it. £70 later for my own Windows XP disc and we got it going again.
Then I went back to China.. The computer worked fine until the battery went flat. The Uk plug was now in a Chinese adapter and the charger was not working. Plugging it in brought the charger light for a few seconds and then it went out. I went along to the Acer agents with the charger as it was still under guarantee. They did not have a plug for a UK 3 pin so they used there own power cable. The charger lit up and I had these strange looks from them as all the supposed voltages flagged up the correct figures; it was therefore the power cord
I was in what is known as ‘Computer City’ in Shenzhen so there were four floors of stalls and shops selling everything from 12” data tapes to keyboard lettering. I found a cableman and by showing him the Chinese end of my power cord he pulled out a replacement at about £1. I took this home and everything was fine again.
For the next four years this computer trundled backwards and forwards from the UK to China. This time there was an adapter for the UK bit. It needed a new keyboard in China and I tried to get them to put in a UK version but as it was a warranty change (coffee spill, admitted??) they could not do that. After four years the hard drive showed signs of distress so pertinent information was copied and a new 80G replaced the 40G version. The people that did the hard drive set up the computer on a local OEM so it arrived, in English, but smothered in Chinese websites and advertising.
I wanted to install my own copy of XP3 so they gave me a disc that had all the erase and reformat programmes to do this. This I did and soon I was back to what it had been before.
Then I came back to the UK, permanently.
It worked fine. The keyboard was set to English so the UK sourced external keyboard was quite happy. Along came a mega birthday and the kids bought me a baby laptop as they thought the 2500 was too heavy. Two weeks later the 2500 started scrolling and failing to start. I would go through infinite variables from reset to Start in Safe Mode but the whole thing was a disaster. By some inexplicable combination I got the thing started long enough to download all my necessary information from it to a memory stick.
This is where the baby computer came in, a Samsung 130. I had to buy a DVD RWR and upgrade it to Windows 7 Home premium so I could offload the Acer.. After a week or so of trying to get the Acer to behave I started to read the funeral dirge. I then flashed out on a 19" monitor for the Samsung so now everything was happy and glorious. However, being an obstinate sod I had to get this Acer going.
I had lost my Chinese erase and format disc so I download freebees to do the same thing. The best part of a day was spent erasing disc partitions, reformatting and reloading quite a few programmes. Came the end everything was tikkityboo; I had tried ten starts so I put it to bed. Next morning, same thing, failed to start, same procession of faults.
Wiped the whole thing clean again. Reloaded everything again. This time looking at power interruptions whilst loading. Chinese plug into English adapter, not the most secure of connections. Decide to change the plug to UK so as to eliminate.
I cut the Chinese plug off and strip the wires. The coding is simple. as before; brown to live, blue to neutral and yellow green to earth. I wire it up but this time memories of 2004 come up so I check the results with a tester. The live feed is going into the wrong pin in the charger. That cannot be right so I strip the remaining wire on the plug and do a continuity check. The blue wire goes to the right hand lower on the wall plug which is supposed to be the live pin. In other words they have been cross wired against British and EU standards.
I worked in China for some fifteen years and during that time I have used my electrical training to correct some of the horrendous installations in the flats I have lived in. I have always known that the live pin is ALWAYS the lower right in a plug receptacle.
In China I was wrong as the following pictures will show.
A standard UK plug with the polarity lettering.
http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee224/fareastdriver/IMGP3396.jpg
A Chinese plug with the polarity lettering.
http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee224/fareastdriver/IMGP3394.jpg
So if you buy anything in China be careful of the polarity. Even more so if you are Australian because the plugs are the same.
When I got back to the UK I could not plug the charger in as in China you have a similar system to Australia, ie 3 bladed angled pins and I did not have an adapter. To save time I cut off the plug and replace it with a UK 3 pin plug. The wiring was easy: brown is live, blue is neutral and green/yellow is earth. Everything fired up and I was happy.
About a month later the computer started rolling, going to random selections and eventually folded. I took it along to a computer whizzkid but he, or I, could not understand the Chinese setup discs to restore it. £70 later for my own Windows XP disc and we got it going again.
Then I went back to China.. The computer worked fine until the battery went flat. The Uk plug was now in a Chinese adapter and the charger was not working. Plugging it in brought the charger light for a few seconds and then it went out. I went along to the Acer agents with the charger as it was still under guarantee. They did not have a plug for a UK 3 pin so they used there own power cable. The charger lit up and I had these strange looks from them as all the supposed voltages flagged up the correct figures; it was therefore the power cord
I was in what is known as ‘Computer City’ in Shenzhen so there were four floors of stalls and shops selling everything from 12” data tapes to keyboard lettering. I found a cableman and by showing him the Chinese end of my power cord he pulled out a replacement at about £1. I took this home and everything was fine again.
For the next four years this computer trundled backwards and forwards from the UK to China. This time there was an adapter for the UK bit. It needed a new keyboard in China and I tried to get them to put in a UK version but as it was a warranty change (coffee spill, admitted??) they could not do that. After four years the hard drive showed signs of distress so pertinent information was copied and a new 80G replaced the 40G version. The people that did the hard drive set up the computer on a local OEM so it arrived, in English, but smothered in Chinese websites and advertising.
I wanted to install my own copy of XP3 so they gave me a disc that had all the erase and reformat programmes to do this. This I did and soon I was back to what it had been before.
Then I came back to the UK, permanently.
It worked fine. The keyboard was set to English so the UK sourced external keyboard was quite happy. Along came a mega birthday and the kids bought me a baby laptop as they thought the 2500 was too heavy. Two weeks later the 2500 started scrolling and failing to start. I would go through infinite variables from reset to Start in Safe Mode but the whole thing was a disaster. By some inexplicable combination I got the thing started long enough to download all my necessary information from it to a memory stick.
This is where the baby computer came in, a Samsung 130. I had to buy a DVD RWR and upgrade it to Windows 7 Home premium so I could offload the Acer.. After a week or so of trying to get the Acer to behave I started to read the funeral dirge. I then flashed out on a 19" monitor for the Samsung so now everything was happy and glorious. However, being an obstinate sod I had to get this Acer going.
I had lost my Chinese erase and format disc so I download freebees to do the same thing. The best part of a day was spent erasing disc partitions, reformatting and reloading quite a few programmes. Came the end everything was tikkityboo; I had tried ten starts so I put it to bed. Next morning, same thing, failed to start, same procession of faults.
Wiped the whole thing clean again. Reloaded everything again. This time looking at power interruptions whilst loading. Chinese plug into English adapter, not the most secure of connections. Decide to change the plug to UK so as to eliminate.
I cut the Chinese plug off and strip the wires. The coding is simple. as before; brown to live, blue to neutral and yellow green to earth. I wire it up but this time memories of 2004 come up so I check the results with a tester. The live feed is going into the wrong pin in the charger. That cannot be right so I strip the remaining wire on the plug and do a continuity check. The blue wire goes to the right hand lower on the wall plug which is supposed to be the live pin. In other words they have been cross wired against British and EU standards.
I worked in China for some fifteen years and during that time I have used my electrical training to correct some of the horrendous installations in the flats I have lived in. I have always known that the live pin is ALWAYS the lower right in a plug receptacle.
In China I was wrong as the following pictures will show.
A standard UK plug with the polarity lettering.
http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee224/fareastdriver/IMGP3396.jpg
A Chinese plug with the polarity lettering.
http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee224/fareastdriver/IMGP3394.jpg
So if you buy anything in China be careful of the polarity. Even more so if you are Australian because the plugs are the same.