Hey what's up guys! My ryde's been itching for Digital Wheelz screen but I'm not good at carputers. Is there a site I can buy a carputer completely built? I'm looking on spending only $500 on the carputer. I have an old fujitsu laptop that I cant remember the specs off the top of my head but it's over 6 years old. If I could salvage and use it along with Digital Wheelz screen, that'd be terrific! Thanks guys

 

You won't be able to buy any prebuilt carputer for $500. You could try and use that laptop, but laptops are a real PITA to retro into a carPC. And the fact that you said that you are not good with carputers leads me to steer you away from that option.

 

Of course I had to chime in here.

With a CarPC, you can go cheap, if you do the work yourself. Conversely, you can go expensive, and get it all done by someone. However, you can't really go cheap and not be good with computers.

Converting a laptop is a pretty big task, and would require a good bit a computer knowledge. Also, a laptop that is 6 years old will NOT have the computing horsepower to run a decent CarPC setup.

Take a look at www.mp3car.com and go to the store they have, as well as the forums. The store has some prebuilt computers, that while probably not under $500, will come pretty close to it. However, then you are looking at the DW screen for another $750, and various assorted parts, cables, etc.. are going to run at least another $250. I'm not trying to discourage you, but you need to know, going in, that it will cost more than you think, both time and effort.

All in all, it's well worth it, though, if done right.

Dave

 

For laptop you will most likely need to have two wires soldered on the laptop power button (most shops will charge you $10-$20) and connected to constant-to-momentary relay ($5-$10 in parts), which will be also connected to ACC line. Relay and power button will be used only for powering up. Standby and hibernation you can setup in Windows Power Options. You will also need DC-to-DC laptop car charger ($40-$70), VGA cable, audio ...

 

What about the Mini Mac?

 

you can probably get a mac mini for $500 off of ebay. The problems you will then run into are:

1. There are not very many, and not very many well developed, front ends for the mac mini, making in-car usage very difficult

2. Hardware support is going to be limited (as far as GPS receivers, FM tuners, etc).

3. You are still going to have to pay $99ish for a power supply, + wiring and assorted other items. Could put you to about $150.

But your main issues will be #1 and #2. The CarPC community is 99% Intel/PC focused and not Mac focused, so you aren't going to have the same amount of help and support that you could. Check out the Mac section of mp3car.com forums. That will be about your only source of help.

 

Couple of things to keep in mind for a CarPC:

1. Operating System: as was said, the majority of the front ends are for Windows based systems. So, a Mac Mini, while not impossible, would cause problems.

2. Power supply. You need some sort of inverter with a startup/shutdown controller to run a carPC of of it's regular power supply, or you can remove the power supply it came with and install a DC-DC power supply.

So, laptops cause one setof problems, a Mac Mini causes another set of problems. This is not to say it can't be done, since it has been done both of those ways, but neither way is very easy.

Dave

 

CarPCs are one of those things where the more money you spend, the easier it gets. The less money you spend, the harder and more work it requires. I guess that goes for a lot of things... hmm... but yeah, especially so with carPCs. There are a lot of products out there that specifically solve the unique problems/needs that occur in a carPC install. If you are willing to spend the money for these, problems are solved much quicker and easier. If you are unwilling to spend the money, you have to spend more time creating solutions to problems that hundreds of others already spent way too much time solving already. No judgement here on you or your choices, just laying out what's ahead.

 

Thanks guys for the input. I mean it'd be sweet to dl mpegs off the net, have real time traffic reports, gps navigation, etc but it seems too costly. I guess I'll have to settle on getting DG's screen and a dvd player which will probably cost me only a grand. Thanks again

 

If you want a powerful prebuilt carputer, then I can suggest KamrocK Dashtop KM-2 Carputer. I bought mine a few weeks ago, its just works flawless, i love it. Plus its the fastest Dashtop (carputer) avalible for purchase. Buy KamrocK Dashtop now, and you wont regret it. visit kamrock.ca

 

Do you work for them or something?

 

Hmm, 1 post to his name, mentions the product and website.

Looks like spam, smells like spam, tastes like spam.

Must be spam.

 

Yeah, I thought that was pretty comical