OT: how to charge laptop battery outside of laptop

[Elekta]

Sony pcg-fx 390p.

Power adaptor plug broken away from motherboard and unable to run laptop or charge battery. Have $9 adaptor on the way from ebay, but looking to charge totally dead batteries to get pics off of hard drive for first day of school tomorrow.

I don't really want to chop up power cord, but could it be done with alligator clips? How to keep from frying battery? Use meter to tell when charged?

Does sony even make a battery charging station to charge them outside the laptop?

thanks and I'll hang up and listen off the air.

geoff

[Qube]

Given it's Lithium Ion, you'll need some type of charge controller. Conceivably, you can use something like the Super Brain 977 to do it... I have one and I charge everything with it (except laptop batteries). For charging and reconditioning AA size and smaller, you can't beat the La Crosse Alpha Power Battery Charger.

[Elekta]

who has this? circuit city? frys? best buy? someplace open today?

awesome help, thanks

[Eric Clark]

My POS Dell did the same thing. I fixed it by buying an IBM/Lenovo.

[Qube]

Nah, the Super Brain's are pro hobby chargers. Again, it's a gamble as most notebook batteries have specialized charge circuitry (hence so many connectors).

[Elekta]

Nah, the Super Brain's are pro hobby chargers. Again, it's a gamble as most notebook batteries have specialized charge circuitry (hence so many connectors).

So I should skip this charger?

[HDhandyman]

I'm in the business and I have all the adaptors already but, if it was me I'd just take the hard drive out of the laptop and and use an external drive connector for laptops to hook up to whatever other computer you have at your disposal.

Is there a local computer shop nearby, maybe a campus store, or a computer specialty store that sells components and stuff?...should only cost about 15 bucks.

maybe this helps, maybe not. BTW, I wouldn't try to hack into a lithium battery to charge it.

[Elekta]

that's what I am doing. I just received a new jack to solder onto the motherboard. Problem is here in Austin, computer techs treat sony vaio's like they were the plague or something, so it's hard to get someone to even work on it.