Powering Laptops in your Car

For that money you can buy a 150W inverter which will run the laptop and also be useful for other things, like charging your handheld UHF radio, etc.

The 12V step up adapter is only any good for the one purpose.

But it's good to see options are available at a reasonable price.

I have used the Jaycar product with a couple of laptops. No problems with it at all. I prefer not to have 240v floating around inside the car, although I use an inverter in the tub (Hilux dualcab) for charging other items.

Cheers,

Michael

Do a Google search for Mr Inverters. I just got a 350 W inverter for about $140. They have smaller ones for cheaper. Advantage of an inverter is we also charge the camera batteries, phone batteries and a few other thinks with it.

I guess it depends if you ever expect to need 240V for anything else.

What's th the laptop you're powering?
If it's a desknote like device (desktop CPU @ 3.2Gig) or similar, then go with the 6A@20V, as the battery is almost certainly a higher drain item to keep up with the CPU (??)

Check what your laptop needs as the charging requirement, and then get the most appropriate!
Although the extra 2.5A of juice at the lower voltages may come in handy!

People always talk of using an inverter to power a laptop from the car, and while this can be handy if you alredy have the inverter, One would always assume tha a native low power transformer would be MORE EFFICIENT at tranforming 12volts into 19 or 20 volts!!

Why would you want to waste the power of your car battery to convert 12v into 240v to power/charge a 20v laptop? (doesn't make sense) and wastes more battery power than need be!
(but then again, I can spend 12 hours a night at the keyboard, so every last drop of those 12 volts counts!! ;-)

cheers.