Surge Protection.

well of course its safe to do so, but the surge protector would never do anything as the inverter would barely have enough oomph to create a surge IMHO

Others might say they get away with it, but I wouldn't use a mod sine wave inverter to power any electronics. I've seen too many blown power supplies as the result of using them.

You don't need a 240 volt surge protector in my opinion.
The source supply is 12 volts and is unlikely to "surge" to any large amount.

The standard laptop power adapter (switched mode power supply) which you would still use, will filter everything anyway and the majority of these will run successfully from a modified sine wave inverter.

Now having said that. Why use an inverter anyway. You are taking a 12 volt DC input, converting it to 240 volt AC output, then feeding this into the laptop power power adapter which converts it from 240 volts AC back to a DC voltage of whatever value required for the Laptop. (somewhere between 12 volts DC and 19 volts DC. This seems to be a waste of energy, plus you need room to contain the inverter.

Unless you have a really weird laptop, a "laptop adapter" is a much better proposition. Something like the Kerio adapter from Dick Smith's comes with a variety of different "blades" to set the output voltage to your laptop's specific voltage requirement and is very compact in size.

About the only laptop that won't allow it's internal battery to charge from the adapter is a Dell, although the laptop can still be powered successfully. The Dell has it's own proprietary method and only a Dell adapter (which I use) will charge the battery as well as power the laptop.

surely it depends upon the power source. If it was, for instance a GMC gennie with it's volatillity, then maybe it would be relevant to run: Gennie-surge protector-inverter-Laptop. That's my understanding, anyway - but I may have mis understood the question.

We got a pure sine wave inverter for the laptop - not worth risking loosing an expensive laptop for want of a $300 investment (which is more than adequate for the laptop - we could have gone smaller). We kept the old modified square wave one as it is fine for charging batteries. They are set up in the caravan, so we had the room for both.

Motherhen