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[Mad1]

I've just build a PC for my landy. Its something I've wanted to do for ages and when pay day came I decided to go ahead with it.

Specs
Intel i3 2100T 2.5GHz 35W
4GB stick DDR3 Only got 1 stick so its easy to chuck another stick of 4GB in when I go 64bit
Asus P8H61-i mini ITX motherboard
750GB 2.5" SATA HDD Seagate
Antec ISK-300-150
XP pro SP3
300W inverter

It's going to be used for mapping software, videos, engine diagnostics, web cam for recording driving adventures, rear parking camera.

Its all built and ready to install. That was the easy bit, the tricky bit is finding a suitable place to mount the case.
For the monitor I'm using a Lilliput 669GL 7" TFT touch screen which will be mounted into the dash with a little cutting.  

The Pc is extremely quiet and well ventilated (could be a bad thing for dust!!!) and its rapid too! I've left intel speed step enabled to keep power consumption and heat down.
Systems I contemplated first were dual core Atom processors, but I just felt I may get restricted by the poor graphics and slow CPU which is why I went for the i3 with its better on CPU GFX processor, while still being low wattage.

I'll possibly fit an SSD in the future although boot time is under 10 seconds at the moment!!! Also a slim optical drive.

For a keyboard im using the on screen accessibility one that comes with XP and its working fine. Just becomes a problem when I need to enter the BIOS and for that I'll be using a flexible keyboard that I can roll up and keep out of the way until I need it.

[keasy]

Man you are so gonna crash having all that lovely tech goodness beside you when driving...temptation too much....musssst resist.....must not touch....BANG!

 

[Mad1]

Just been a test drive now, yeah it is very tempting to keep looking at it.

The PSU is making a faint buzzing sound, not sure what it could be. 

[Wooster]

I'll get one when they invent a HUD to go with it. 

[digidix]

Surely you don't want a hard drive in your setup if you are going to use it for navigation purposes, I would reckon you could use a flash drive to boot things up and operate

[Wooster]

The navigation data would be cached in the system memory, so it's not like the drive would be thrashing. 

[Mad1]

Magnetic hard drives have good shock resistance these days. Besides, I may actually be doing away with this setup and starting again I've decided I don't really need this much power for a car pc so this may turn into a media/file server.

I think I'm going to go with an even lower powered dual core Atom setup with an SSD because if memory servers SSD's use less power than a magnetic drive.

[Wooster]

I thought last year that I was onto a good idea for a novel 'in car' system, but suspected in the back of my mind that it was such a good idea that someone had already thought of it.

I didn't check until a couple of days ago and right enough, it's been done already.  
http://www.roadhawk.co.uk/



I was aiming at the under £50 - £100 market though.
Their cheapest is £200.