Hey Stubby,

As you are only wanting to keep your lappy going for a few hours during the sporadic power outages I suggest you put wind turbines in your yard..........

Don't you need to get planning permission or something before you just erect turbines?

I like the idea... A lot less messy than a generator + daily petrol....

Nah, just hide em in the backyard behind the house.

But I want a big one so I can sell the excess power to local homes and biz....

I also suggest a large car battery or small truck battery with a couple of alligator clips and a cable running into a cigarette lighter socket. You can then plug a car laptop charger into the cigarette lighter socket. You will also need a battery charger to charge the car or truck battery when your power comes back on.

I know it sounds so simple but wouldn't your cheapest and easiest option be to buy 2 new laptop batteries, possibly one of them being an extended long life battery?

If I lived in a condo and had problems with frequent power outages, low voltage or spikes, I'd buy a large deep cycle battery and a small pure sine wave inverter to run my computer full time from the battery. A small automatic 230 volt charger will keep your battery fully charged. Large UPS units are expensive and don't really last that long. I went through two UPS units before I went solar.