
With the problems of power cuts and downtime from Telkom I have been forced to drive round to find free hotspots. The trouble was that with my reasonably new computer I did not get more than a 1 hour stint on the Net.
The reason why many Laptop batteries do not hold their change is because they are never allowed to be drained flat by either going for a drive or switching off the power supply until the laptop switches off.
The best thing to do is remove the battery pack when very low and leave it out of the computer for a few days. During this time your laptop works as normal without its battery. After a few days your battery will have gone flat, you can then fully charge it by putting it back in the laptop.
If the battery is removed my “Sony” laptop works very well between 14.5-18.5v dc. The start-up voltage is around 19v . I tried this with the original battery in the laptop and it drew 4.5Amps, with the battery removed it drew mostly 1.09- 1.8Amps. This was when it was being used with a WiFi dongle. In extreme cases when more than one application was being used the amperage drawn went up to 2.4amps for a short while. I have tried it for 2 hours and have no adverse effects. The advantage of using the charger input is that you get full screen brightness and all functions as if using the mains. This method is much cheaper than a DC -DC power supply that drain the battery when not using the engine. I have driven with this setup and found that it does prolong the time I can use the computer on line around town.
The way I got the voltage was joining a 6 volt battery in line with my car battery, using a cigarette lighter plug. The wire carrying the DC plug for the laptop was cut and another plug and socket added. I can now use this with the laptop power supply or the battery version in my car.

I will put all the photo`s on this blog latter in case anyone is interested. Or I can email them to you. whitewolf1@live.fr
All photo`s and text will be on the Webpage first.