Bobby, the IR reciever is up front, it's attached to a PS2 keyboard extension. There's a pic of it on the web page.

Xterrian, I'd like to see a shot of the fiberglass monitor case you made. That's something I wanted to try with a different display I have here. Mine was about $350 off of eBay, I actually got two for that price! The touchscreen part was something I scavenged from another dislay and hacked in. Do you have a link for Pilot Pivot? It didn't google.

Thanks guys!

Lifeboat,

that Keypower KP-D250, did you buy from the importer or a distributer, $?. Does it support ATX power control features, and lastly why the preference for the PC Pwr+Cooling solution?

It wasn't mentioned - what's your OS?

thx,
-Paul

I got the supply used from someone at the MP3Car forum. It's full ATX, 2.01. I like the PCPower model mostly because of the 1U form factor, which would allow for a much smaller enclosure. I think it may only be 100W though. If you are comfortable making your own, there are parts and plans to be found at the MP3Car forums for a couple of very small DC-DC supply. Fairly simple design, but not something I wanted to deal with.

I think the hot ticket for this stuff is going to be the new mini-ITX boards from VIA. They have an onboard power system and take 12VDC directly. I'm just waiting for a faster processor to become available, because it uses an embedded C3, which isn't all that great.

OS is WinXP. MS is working on a more graphical home-theater oriented OS too, should be out in a few months. I think it's called Freestyle or something. That might turn out to be very good for cars too.

Here's where I got my LCD: Click Here

This is where I got the Pivot software:
Click Here

Here's the MP3 Car site:
MP3 Car

The newest update of mapsource available at www.garmin.com allows scrolling realtime tracking with your GPS. Make sure you download it!

IMHO, National Geographic TOPO! is the best though...

Bryan

Lifeboat,
What did you use for a monitor stand?

I couldn't find anything on Via's mini-ITX description to verify this. It seems to use yet another new combination of regulated 5 and 12V. Do you know the link?

BTW, have you tried hibernate mode to improve startup (40 sec) and shutdown (8 sec) speed?
Also, turning off unnecessary services can improve the speed and lower the basic memory load to < 48 MB.

My mistake on the ITX power system, it's not on the board itself. I've read that some of the barebones ITX enclosures include a 12VDC power supply though.

I have tried both sleep and hibernate, it tries to work, but for some reason when I resume from hibernation I usually get a blue screen. When it does work though, my startup time is about 20 seconds from hibernate, and almost instant from sleep.

Here's the link for a mini-ITX w/ the DC power unit:

Case Outlet

...thanks..

You can all try this site for small pc computers:

http://www.littlepc.com

I'm curious...do you experience any overheating problems? Wouldn't leaving a car out in a hot summer day cause hardware problems to the computer? Namely the HD?

Zerokarma: thanks for the link, those are cool little PCs. Expensive though...

Socal: Heat may serve to reduce the lifespan on the drives, but is unlikely to cause failure unless we are talking about really extreme temps. I ran my system 10-12 hours a day for 5 days on a x-country trip this summer, with no problems.