Bill Collier,
I just turned the Gateway over, it is model 7405GX, it has that new bright screen, which this non-electrican suspects calls for a bit more power than my previous models with the older technology screen.
When you look at your power supply there are 2 sets of numbers, the Gateway numbers are: 2.4 amps input and 4.9 amps output. These are numbers for when you are running on housepower, not truck power. (Housepower being 110 and truck power being 12 volt, you can all correct me if I am wrong on this)
If I remember what Al was telling me the other day when we were figuring this all out, is that we had to convert the INPUT number which is 2.4 amps by multiplying, by 110. That was 264. The output of our invertor was 175 and 300 max. He felt that the 264 draw was too much for that 175 with 300 max.
See the problem for me is that you gotta get all the numbers on the same kind of power. Truck is 12 volt, the numbers for the Gateway are 110. Then you gotta get the output of the inverter and the required input for the computer.
It is very confusing, ain't it????
So, IF we want to run the Gateway on an inverter it is gonna have to be a new inverter, hard wired to the truck battery, with sufficient size wiring to handle the loads. OR, run Gateway on it's own battery and when it runs down, I am done!
So far the only times I have been running Gateway while we are on the road is when the GPS could not find the campgrounds we wanted to set as way points (all done on the fly, as we did not decide where we wanted to stop till we were almost there, aka, when we got tired). I pulled Gateway out, started up Microsoft Streets and Trips, and found out where we were going with the maps. S & T did not accept the address of the campground either, but I was able with the nice big bright screen to find the place with the larger format maps and screen. It worked for us, we found the campground and got some sleep, a good thing!
Carol