Baslinux mailing list

["Samual Acorn" <sam.acorn AT gmail.com>]

it sounds counter productive but the best way to do that would be to
use one of those tiny cheap 12 inverters for cars... most of them will
tell you when the car (or other 12v battery) is low* and you wont have
to find a way to bump the voltage up (or down) to the laptops odd
voltages since youll be able to use the 'wall wart' that goes with the
laptop...

*using an external battery source directly with a laptop will make the
laptop think its plugged into the wall and think it has an 'infinite'
source of power... it wont be able to tell when the batteries get low
which is definitly a bad thing...

of course this is just one way to do it... you could get really
complicated and use a bank of your choice of cells(batteries) and a
pic chip connected to the serial port to monitor both charging and
discharging... ;)

using solar charging is up to you but you wont be able to run a laptop
directly off of a solar cell (unless you plan on spending alot of
cash) and charging will be very slow going (again unless you plan to
spend $$$$)


in other words... long answer (above) short answer; yes but be
cautious of the charge state of those batteries

unfortunatly, to be totally honest, the best way to run a laptop with
a dead battery -is- the extension cord approach... (ive tried running
my 'tops off of various sources but i cant get farther from the 'wall'
than the network cable {or null modem cable depending on the
machine-in-questions age} will let me so ive never made serious use of
any of the experements)


On 13/12/06, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> >
> >> And I am told that new replacements are very expensive,
> >
> > $70 is pretty typical here...  which is a lot of money to
> > spend on a $10 laptop.
>
> Is it possible to run a laptop computer off a generic external battery
> such as a car battery, plus some sort of voltage regulator?
> Solar charged?
>
> >> What do you do ?
> >
> > I plug it into the wall.  When I carry the laptop around,
> > I always take an extension cord.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Steven
> >
> keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org


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