You can make your life easy by using an inverter/charger system.  Basically it's
a battery that converts DC to AC and also has the capability to be recharged. To
supply DC directly to the laptops will require to hack your laptops to get the
DC portion and I don't think you want to do that. They aren't really that
expensive since laptops do not require that much power.

Olushola Sowande

> We are trying to implement a Point of Sale system for retail sales at
> remote location. There is no A/C power to speak of, but a generator that
> charges a bank of deep charge, gel 12volt batteries. We want to run a
> couple of notebooks or laptops for sales directly of the bank of batteries
> rather than invert the D/C to A/C. This loses so much in the invertion
> process that it is inefficient. I know you can run laptops off external
> powersources, but how can I regulate the power off the bank of deep cells
> to match these laptops?

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