In reply to:

Well, an inverter doesn't cost that much... it's not elegant, but it could work.



For how long? On a long car trip (in a rental, sadly, no empeg) I had my laptop plugged into an inverter and was using GPS and about 15gb of USGS quad maps just for amusement. I left Pittsburgh at like 9:30am. Around 10pm I was in west-central Vermont, and some of the folks in the back of the van commented about "that fire smells good". I realized what it was, and pulled the molten plastic of the cigarette lighter plug out, and that was the end of that inverter. Oops.