Well this is sorta like the dredded "red plastic thread".. and here I am furthering it on...
I dunno which dell laptop you have, but there are numerous adapters
at www.dell.com. Some are third party, at least one is a dell.
Btw, I actually am annoyed that the laptop wastes deep cycle charge keeping
the internal battery charged. On my last laptop, I'd pop out the
battery and just run on the external deepcycle battery (hence conserving
deepcycle charge).
Two other things I've noted...
1) When plugged into "AC" most laptops run in "high performance" mode.
I added a power mgmt setting "astro" that is like "running on batteries", and
use it when running off the deep cycle battery (to conserve the battery
on long trips).
2) Those DC-DC adapters can be tricky... I burned out two IBM adapters
by feeding it less than 12v. The deep cycle battery was low. Fortunately
they were replaced free. The last one I got seems to _not_ fail when
the input 12v is low. It just shuts off.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob Hawley" <robhawley@earthlink.net>
To: "The Astronomy Connection" <sf-bay-tac@seds.org>
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 10:52 AM
Subject: RE: [TAC] Solar Battery Charger == Some Questions
> Dell does not sell a 12V adapter. The DC portion of the laptop adapter is
> 19.5V.
>
> My batteries do permit 12V charging, but the manufacturer warned that using
> 12V to charge my closed cell battery would reduce its life. Others have
> since confirmed that.
>
> Hence I have left with doing all of my recharging at 110V.
>
> Rob Hawley
>
>
>
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 26 21:07:53 2004