My universal adapter was way less than that! In any case, use a multi meter and see if there is any voltage potential between the car ground and your laptop's ground while the engine is running. Try flipping between a/c and d/c and see if you obvserve any voltage potential.ReZZeX wrote:You may be right; the only problem is I don't have the cig adapter for my laptop. I was actually thinking of buying one just so I could run the laptop for anything in my car without worrying about battery life.
However, even if it did work; I would like to resolve the problem without the dependency of a cig adapter. The cig adapter is somewhere around 100 give or take.
Cheap grounding: Go to radioshack -- get an alligator clip end and a crim on eye/fork connector end. Get a strand of generic wire / speaker wire and crim/solder the aligator clip to one end and the eye or fork connector end to the other end. Grab a screw that is of the same diameter as one of the 'screw ins' on the back of your laptop for say the external monitor connector or something similar, or if you want, just back out of of those (it will have a hex head) with a pair of needle nose plyers. Secure the fork/eye connector to the back of the computer in this fashion and then clip the alligator side to something grounded in the car like a bolt under the dash or similar.
Hope that helps.