I'll be buying a carputer pretty soon and wanted to know which ones are good and what kind of processors and such should i looking for( all the technical stuff). Also, anybody who already has one in your car installed can you provide me some information on your setup along with some pics, it will be really help ful. Thanks in advance.

 

Don might know!

*turns on Pearl96max lights*

 

you can take any old pc and make it into a "carputer". a basic celeron 1.7ghz would work fine cetrino would be better though. you'll need a power converter as well. my brother has a carputer in his a4 made from parts laying around.

 

i say go mini itx motherboard that doesn't have a built in processor and make sure you put it in a well ventilated case don't try to squeeze it in b/c they get hot very quickly and for the monitor go with the flip out Lilliput touchscreen thats what i used and worked great for me

 

Buy mine and you will be good to go.

 

There are a ton of things to consider when installing a carputer, however it doesnt have to be a top of the line computer just to do stuff like gps, music, and play dvd's ect... A big thing you need to look at is power, many people dont use a dc to ac back to dc converter because it can cause "noise" when you are playing your music. Also be aware of shock, bumps ect. most computers arent made to be moved around alot like that. Personally, i just bought a laptop with a broken screen off of ebay that i am going to be taking apart and putting it into my dash probably, this solves the problem of power, and laptops are made to be mobile so...

www.mp3car.com is a very good resource for information. Good luck on your build and keep us updated, mabye some pics and a write up as you go?

 

I think you'd have some issues with finding the variety of ITX compatible parts. I'd stick with mini ATX. OR you can look at what Shuttle makes. Google htpc cases too if you want to go DIY.
As WebGuy said, you need to worry about power, hard drive bumping, etc. Modern laptop hard drives are made more for shock resistance/absorbing so you could buy one of those, then an adaptor for that HDD to an IDE plug. Another caveat would be the heat coming from the PSU and possibly CPU.

An old PS2 could do the trick too...

 

thanks but i already installed one in the car.. bought it from UnMaTcHeD
this is the system www.carpc.com
and heres pics the after installing it http://forums.maxima.org/showthread.php?t=530762

 

link not working. I'd like to see!
Jae

 

I doubt you'll be playing high-resource video games in your car off it, so I'd suggest just going with a lower-end PC thrown in a case in your trunk (with LOTS of muffin fans).. it'll work fine for GPS, music, etc.. hook it up to an AC adapter, Garmin GPS receiver of some sort, and then all that's left is to figure out your display and input devices (touchscreens are nice!)

 

Zachs, what size pc were you thinking of? I didn't feel like having a tower in my trunk. I'm scouring ebay for laptops w/non-functioning screens at the moment. How are you controlling the on/off of the computer?

Jae