I have an old laptop gathering dust and wanted to know if you guys thinks its possible to use it in the car to play mp3s. My two main questions are:

Do i NEED a inverter? The battery is already providing 12v DC, is there a safe way to power the laptop with that, or should i just stop being cheap and get an inverter.

Secondly, how could the audio be hooked up? The protege5 has a optional slot for minidisc... Does this mean the CD player has a secondary input which could recieve audio from the laptop, instead of a minidisc.

Justtttt wondering
And has anyone done anything else with a laptop in their car?

 

You can always get one of those casette adaptors that plug into the headphone jack of your laptop. That would probably be the cheapest way for you to get the audio signal into your stock head unit. As for powering it up, you should be able to either go directly to the cig adaptor, but be sure that your laptop runs on 12v. The car's output actually fluctuates between 10-14 volts, so your laptop may act alittle funny. Just get an inverter to ensure you don't have any problems.

 

I looked around on Radioshacks site and found what i want, A DC to DC converter for laptops, has various output voltages so it should work fine, plus its only around $40 CAD.

An inverter would just seem ironic to me, id have to buy the inverter, then it connects to laptops AC to DC adapter..... see what i mean, two adapters to go from DC to AC to DC again.

Anyways, now that I got that figured out, anyone help on the Protege5's CD player info. How can i get another input into it? If neccessary is it possible to replace the AM/FM antenna signal, with the laptop..

Oh, an wait till you see the little LCD screen im gonna put in with it