converted 12 volt pc tower any one done it ??

[lightspeed]

i read somewhere maybe on here or a converted van camper site that anyone can take their pc and have a voltage thing, etc. put into it so it will run off 12 volts has anyone ever done it ? would that be better or just leave a regular electric plug in and use a power converter ? and a flat screen monitor ?? as i don't want to give up my xp tower that i have (i like it to much ) !

[markopolo]

12volts in an RV is really approx 12.5v and up to 14.4volts when charging. I don't know if your computer would like 14.4 volts.

It would be easier to use an inverter. The guy I bought my RV from had his PC tower in it for a cross country trip.

[paulm]

Marko is right about the inverter. Your tower would need 12, 5 & 3.5 volt regulated supplies. Since it is a switching power supply it may be possible to dump raw 12-16 volt into and let it do it's job, but SHOW ME

With the price of laptops nowadays, I would think that's the way to go. Cigarette chargers are available or cheapy 80 watt inverters will work. And in the long run, it should draw less power and less drain on the campers batteries.

[renrut]

On an aircraft I worked on, we had 6 computers connected to a server. All the computers ran off of the aircraft 28volt (regulated) system. It was one of the biggest problems we had. All the PC's would continually crash because of the bad regulation in the voltage. Even with the power supply in the PC's, the power variation caused all kinds of problems. We never had any issues with the server because it had it's own very expensive power supply.

The easiest and cheapest thing to do would be to use an inverter as suggested. The only thing I would recommend is getting one with enough power to run the PC. A lot of PC's have a minimum 250 watt power supply. I would look into a 400 watt inverter to make sure you have enough energy to run the PC.