power inverters and laptops question

Submitted: Sunday, Apr 06, 2008 at 12:56
ThreadID: 56359 Views:4678 Replies:11 FollowUps:2
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G'day all. I'm planning to run Oziexplorer on my laptop with a GPS mouse for my next trip. But I've struck trouble with the power inverter and the laptop. Would appreciate some advice from anyone with experience of the following:

I've purchased an IFONX 150 watt inverter. The back of the package, and everything I've read elsewhere, suggests that a laptop draws about 80 watts. So that should be plenty of room. So long as the laptop is not turned on, I have a green light on the inverter that says 'everything's cool'. However, if I turn on the laptop, then I get the red overload switch. This seems odd, since the DC output from the inverter on the laptop is 16V x 3.75 amps. So given Ohm's law, should draw 60 watts.

The other thing that crossed my mind is that the laptop may want a pure sine wave, but the output of the inverter is a modified one. But this contradicts the advice I was given by the bloke at TJM. Since the power supply charges the laptop's battery and the battery supplies power to the laptop when it is running, this shouldn't matter. It would matter if you were running a desktop PC in your truck, but not a laptop.

Or is it possible that different laptops do it differently? For the record, the laptop is an old Fujitsu Lifebook S6120. Not particularly flash, but compact, rugged and lightweight.

Would love to hear from anyone who's got any insight into this problem.
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