INVERTERS

Does it have to be a "sine" wave thingo or will the standard one do, pardon my electronic ignorance.

no it does not have to be pure sine wave, and if its only a laptop 150w is ok, but if your like most people you will want to start using other stuff too in my case cordless drill chargers and other power tools.

Hi Phil

Yes the Toshiba satellite still use 15v don't really need an inverter , just a good lead made from parts from Jaycar etc.

Interestingly we had visitor the other day who had a quite small laptop and it ran off 12v as opposed to 15v , was a Samsung - must check out further as my Toshiba Satellite is a few years old and has almost forzen up.

Robin Miller

I would not advise this - especially with a new laptop.

I'm guessing that the amount of filtering of the power supply inside the notebook is minimal as the notebooks _expects_ to be fed from it's OEM supply and that supply will ensure its output power is clean.

The raw 12V system on a car is _terrible_ with all sorts of noise and voltage spikes (tens, maybe hundreds of volts) and there is no way of knowing how well, or badly, the notebook may cope with these.

Proceed at your own risk - but, no way, would I do it.

Mike Harding

Hi Mike

There is no risk at all with that particular PC range, and voltage is actually further processed and cleaned up to charge the Li batteries.

Works well and is makes more sense than to upconvert 12 to 240 just so that it can be downconverted in another device back to 14v with poor overall efficentcy, dangerous volts and unecessary leads and equipment.

The downside though is that charging really only occurs when engine is running and you need good lead (> 1mm2 ) so that you do not get any further volts drop.

Robin Miller

Hi Robin

As I'm sure you know; in order to decide if this was a safe practice a detailed engineering examination by a competent person of the internal circuitry of each model of notebook computer one intended to do this with would need to be undertaken and an assessment made of the capability of the device to survive in an automotive environment. It makes no sense for notebook manufacturers to go to the considerable extra expense of protecting their products against automotive supplies when they never expect them to be connected to one.

Frankly I'm surprised you're recommending it to people.

Mike Harding

No need to be suprized Mike, I'm qualified as per your specs, but on same basis I cannot at this stage reccomend the Samsung , but I expect it to be ok.

Its reasonable to be concerned as they are an expensive purchase and its good to know that several of that model have been run on multiple cars over approx 5 years now under my direction, but its comforting to have the practise back up the theory.

Robin Miller

Robin,
That Samsung is the Q1. Came out earlier this year - looks like the perfect computer to mount to the dash for mapping. Runs on XPtablet edition. Has a CF card reader too.

I was pretty keen to get one after breaking the screen on my old tablet, but I've since resurrected an old Tosh running 98SE with 64Mb ram, 6gig HDD, and a video output that goes straight to my 7inch dash screen. We work it on the move with a cordless mouse. So I'll stick with that for a while.

Cheers
Phil

Sounds good Phil , if its like the old Satellite 4030ct I have gathering
dust somewhere here then the external screen would be a desirable option.

Personally I have gained the impression that Samsung products need to be treated warily.
In this case it belonged to a senior executive of a Korean LED manufacturer, he sat down to give us a demo of some new super LEDs and his PC failed to work - determined that it was bad plug on power supply, and I gleefully cut the end off the lead and soldered a new connector on, and stuck some shoe-goo over the exposed 12v plug ends .

After the demo I asked for more than the usual amount of free samples which duly arrived and everybody lived happily ever after.

Robin Miller

(P.S. - When arrived back from Warraweena - my new Garmin 276c had just landed - and it certainly has the screen performance I was expecting)