  Astrophysical compact stars provide a natural laboratory for testing
theoretical models which are otherwise difficult to prove from an experimental
setup. In our present work we analyse an exact solution to the Einstein-Maxwell
system for a charged anisotropic compact body in the linear regime. The charged
parameter may be set to zero which gives us the case of neutral solutions. We
have tuned the model parameters for the uncharged case so as to match with
recent updated mass-radius estimates for five different compact objects. Then
we make a systematic study of the effect of charge for the different parameter
set that fits the observed stars. The effect of charge is clearly illustrated
in the increase of mass. We show that the physical quantities for the objects
PSR J1614-2230, PSR J1903+327, Vela X-1, SMC X-1, Cen X-3 are well behaved.
