Car Adapters
Probably the best thing about laptops is that they can be transported from place to place, rather than desktops, which are tethered to the desk and are so heavy that it’s pretty much impossible to move them around without some difficulty. In the past, using a laptop means sacrificing some power for the sake of portability, but these days, laptops can have just as much computing power as desktops, often making them the computer of choice for home users as well as business users.

And one of the places that people are increasingly getting more usage out of their laptops is in the car. I’m not talking about computing while driving, as that would be extremely dangerous. But often, passengers, and especially children in the backseat of a minivan during long vacation trips, will use their laptops to bide the time while on the road. With the increasing popularity of new mobile broadband solutions by the major cell phone companies, it’s even possible to surf the internet while on the road by accessing it through cell towers along the way.

But what to do if you run out of juice mid-trip? Doing things like browsing the web takes a lot of computing power, and can drain the typical laptop battery fairly quickly. Those 8 hour battery lifetimes that some of the computer makers boast about represent the best case scenario; i.e. when the computer is just sitting there and no one is using it. When you’re constantly using it, it’s more like 2 hours.

Thankfully, there is now an easy way to accomplish laptop charging in the car, as there are car adapters for laptops of most brands, including Dell, HP, and many others. Lind Electronics, in particular, is one company that makes these devices, which include features like output short circuit detection, safety current limiting, and internal temperature limit cut-off circuitry. These advances not only protect the laptop from damage due to uneven current or a short circuit in the car’s wiring, they also protect the car from catching on fire in the event of a short in the circuitry of the adapter, which could potentially cause tremendous heat. This occurs by detecting too much heat in the device when charging the laptop in the car.

Car adaptors for laptops are available at most major electronics retailers, in many countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia.