External battery charger

The charger input jack on my Aspire One seems to be shot - it makes a poor connection. Therefore I am considering an external battery charger. Does anyone have any experience with these? Why are they so expensive? ($68 is the cheapest I could find) Does anyone know where I could find just the plug for the battery - then I could just use a suitable voltage charger of my own, which would be much cheaper.
Thanks in advance for the help!
Pete

 

If you actually have a connection with the A/C power (you say it's "poor") maybe you should focus on that. Is it just dirty inside? You can get a pure solvent isopropanol cleaning spray at an electronics shop to clean up your contacts, inside the power jack and the netbook itself, possibly curing a fouled connection problem. Electrical connections are usually all or none. If it's a "poor" but working connection it might be garden variety gunk from ordinary use.

(No idea about what or how good an external charger for one of these batteries might be. It's not rocket science to make a good one, but as you say, it's not cheap.)