[P1] Revive "new" dead battery (?)

[Charles Pearce]

On Thursday, August 21, 2003, at 07:03  AM, Gary D. Adams wrote:

> VST's website--smartdisk.com 
> (http://store.yahoo.com/smartdiskstore/ibookcharger.html)  $29.95
>
> An amazing deal, considering they include an iBook AC Adapter!
>
> Gary

Recently I made an automobile trip (alone) during which I covered some 
2200 miles in about six days. I looked into buying an automobile 
adapter for my iBook, but couldn't convince myself to shell out almost 
$80. While looking at Wal-Mart for an automobile CD-player adapter (the 
kind that you plug into your automobile cassette player) my eyes fell 
on an AC/DC power inverter for $34.95. This thing takes the 
automobile's 12-volt DC and converts (inverts?) it to 110 volts AC. It 
is only slightly larger than the "wall-warts" one gets these days with 
almost everything, so it doesn't take up much room in the car. I 
plugged my iBook into it, plugged the CD adapter into the iBook, 
started iTunes and put together a playlist of about 12 hours of music 
(all ripped from my own CDs, thank you) and hit the "play" button--a 
continuous stream of uninterrupted music of my choice was then my 
constant companion through several states. I was concerned that the 
inverter would place heavy demands on the car's alternator, but if it 
did, it didn't show on the gauge. I also ran the car's A/C the whole 
way and no problems ever surfaced. The nice thing about this is that it 
charged the iBook battery at the same time. At one point I plugged in 
the cell phone and charged it's battery too. The inverter is rated at 
150 watts (actually can go to 300 if you put a bigger fuse in the 
circuit where it's plugged in) so even an iBook and a cell phone don't 
add up to that much strain.

Charles Pearce (charlesp at ksu.edu)