Laptop use on generator power question
..Pretty sure I know the answer to this, but here goes: Early last month, we tried for the first time, to let the kids use our laptop to watch DVD movies in the RV when on the road. Had the genera...
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The laptop power brick generally doesn't care much about what sort of power it gets. My Lenovo laptop brick has written on it "100-240VAC 50-60Hz". Even more generally speaking, most switching power supplies are not all that sensitive to input waveforms (by design)—they rectify the AC into relatively high-voltage unregulated DC power, and then run a comparatively high-frequency (well, supersonic—tens of kHz) oscillator off of it through a physically small transformer and rectify its output to get their DC output. So long as the input waveform can be rectified into DC power of a reasonable voltage, everything should more or less work.
There are some wrinkles that get thrown in sometimes with power factor correction circuitry.
At any rate, the laptop battery charging is not controlled by the power brick, which basically just supplies juice, but by circuitry in the laptop itself. It may be that playing a DVD (with the DVD drive spinning and presumably the screen brightness turned up) simply uses all the power the brick can supply, leaving none available to charge the batteries. The screen backlight is a fairly large consumer of power in a laptop.
There are some wrinkles that get thrown in sometimes with power factor correction circuitry.
At any rate, the laptop battery charging is not controlled by the power brick, which basically just supplies juice, but by circuitry in the laptop itself. It may be that playing a DVD (with the DVD drive spinning and presumably the screen brightness turned up) simply uses all the power the brick can supply, leaving none available to charge the batteries. The screen backlight is a fairly large consumer of power in a laptop.
