Hi all im new to Car Audio Australia, Im interested in building a carputer, I was after some advice.

I was originally thinking a modded XBOX with upgraded HDD, but im now thinking of building a Car Computer as it would be more compatiable with Touch Screens and GPS and so fourth, plus I have all the stuff laying around at home to build it in PC parts.

Im curious what would be the best OS to run on it, should I just run XP tweaked for quick startup, or are there OS specifically developed just for carputers? Any information or links would be helpful. It would be for mp3's, videos, dvds, maybe GPS at some stage.

Cheers

There aint any OS's yet that are specifically written for carpc's (at least not that i'm aware of), so i just use win xp pro. It does the job nicely and when used with hibernation, avoids slow bootup & shutdown issues. Also, it obviously has lots of software & hardware support which by the sounds of it, you'll be needing.

There's a tool called (nLite i think?) that allows you to make your own xp install that's stripped of certain drivers and components to give it a nice n small footprint and to make it bootup quickly. I tried it but noticed that i actually needed the majority of the components and ended up with an almost full size install anyway, so i just use the full install.

Some people are using this tool to make a super small 'readonly' xp that can run off of a Compact Flash drive. By making it readonly, it increases the lifespan of the CF memory which have a limited number of writes. Also CF is supposed to be more reliable (no moving parts) and in theory, faster than HD's.

Some people use linux which is cool, but i've never tried it since some of my hardware isn't supported. Otherwise, i'd prefer it over anything just to be original and cos it'd be rock solid.

Alot of people are starting to use win MCE. Its great for couch potatoes but, I'm a bit dubious as to how friendly its UI would be whilst driving a car.

Then there's the Mac'ers which i cant comment on as i've got no idea with those things.

I've heard of some hippies using DOS, so if you strut about in a combi, give this a go.

In my opinion, best just to stick with what u know.

Perhaps look into the OS used by palm-pc's. I fail to see why it wouldnt be suitable. Fast start/shutdown, a huge following of program-support, designed to work with touch-screens with aftermarket programs built for limited space....

C++. Lots and lots of C++ You can write your extensions in vBscript and Perl, and your driver support can prolly bedone in vBscript as well.

i want to hack out my HP6515 phone.. its got everything i want in a car computer... gps, win mediaplayer, ... actually thats about it... oh yea, jawbreaker for at traffic lights .



i do have an old palm t5 if sumone knows how to split it all up so i use its internals to run a basic system..







whoa... sorry for the thread hijacking...

i would personally say run xp pro, cut out whatever you dont need to minimise waste, i like the idea of the read-only windows, but i dont have patience to do it , i will be doing my carPC from a laptop HDD mounted in a anti-vibration case

xp supports a lot of apps, hardware, but most of all, front-ends

mate from my experience, best thing is just to run windows xp, sp1 even no special need for sp2.



You can nlite it but then if you dnt know what your shaving out , youll lose system files that might be needed for some programs to run that you dont know of, think .Net Netphone centrafuse etc.

Usually carpcs, dnt have small hard drives so theres also no point to nlite it, just uninstall what you dnt need and make it hibernate everytimeinstead of shutdown (go to control panel>power options> advanced i think > what to do when i press the off button on my pc> select hibernate from the box, and this way if your running a startup shutdown controller it will hibernate eveytime u switch car on/off, or if u have a dedictated switch it hibernates (holding for 6 seconds though will shutdown hard)



that takes care of slow boot times, remember keep ur ram quite low, its a carpc not a gaming system, 25 is plenty, 512 is overflow depends what prgrams u wanna run, i run 256 personally. so thats the quickest option ive found.

Xbox -- too many headaches.

pocketpc ----yes many apps but none dedicated for car





my summary - its good to tinker, but at the end of the day whats tried out and proven is usually the best slution - spend that extra 120 n getting windows than getting linux and trust me you save tens of hours ....my 2cents