Thread: The best in-car system ever L@@K

Thanks DJ Metro.

Peace y'all
MetroBooks are Mp3 mack-daddys

WTF? why dont you go back to ya homies in the crib with your laptops.... ha!

233 mhz....HAH

(nothing against those of you with slow cpus )

[ 08-04-2001: Message edited by: pinkysqueaks ]

Granted the size of the laptop it pretty good 9.9 in. x 6.6 in. x 1.6 in. But thats not using any skills... Now if you seperate the screen from the base mounth the base under seat and screen in view and build a control I may be semi impressed..... The guys a nd girls on this site put alot of blood, sweat and time into a custom setup and do not need newbies blasting thier ideas offer a simple in car laptop! You will need to do something else with it...

I'm glad to hear that I'm a newbie at your site. As far as this being a laptop, I think not. I've never kept in its shell. The screen is mounted right in the center of my dash board where the double din factory radio was - a perfect fit horizontally, and only a centemeter taller than the radio was ( hence the custom molding). My new JVC stereo sits below it in a honda molding for a cassette player. I've done the whole 10.4" non-touch screen in my old car with a decently sized computer in the trunk. Thing is that you gotta make the inside of your car look like an experiment with a wireless keyboard at best and some sort of pointing device. Who need's 10.4" on their dash board anyway the housing turns out to be a foot wide. And the cost is more than this near-complete system. It took me three tries to get this thing to work in the car well. I ended up breaking four laptops over the past 9 months.
I couldn't ask for anything more. The only interface visible is the screen, and when you can get it to fit in the center of the dash and have it look like it came from the factory - you've got your self a good looking system even if it's a 286. The processing power is perfectly fine for anything I plan on doing - Ripped DVD movies, mp3/visualizations, navi, voice command, email, internet, IrDa etc. And why not get yourself a wireless lan card to connect to the desktop inside the house. No disk drives or media to ever think about. We all know that this and many other expansion possibilities exist for any computer, but you can't control all that with a 4x40. I don't know what you guys have been dreaming about, but I certainly started this whole carmp3 thing cause I wanted to replace my car stereo with a full-color winamp that took up the space where my stereo was - and drag the sliding bar with my finger. Ever tried to skip through an mp3 that's 4 hours long? Beleive me that aint no fun with a >> button, and many mp3 CD players just can't really skip around well. Let's re evaluate your dream-system - does it include a touch screen? If it doesn't, why would you want a keyboard and mouse? I can understand having a wireless keyboard is nice - but that's compatible with my system too (been meaning to get one). Plus my on-screen keyboard works when I need one. So, anyway, I think we can agree that having a touchscreen should be a part of a dream in-car computer. Now go out on the internet and find one that has SVGA resolution, is smaller than 10.4", and has 262k colors - for under $450. Probably you won't find one that will work with any old computer - there's all sorts of options like Single-Board computers with TFT interfaces, but even those LCD's without touch cost an arm and a leg. Frankly when I started using Metrobooks, I decided I would never settle for a screen that was NTSC, or less than 640x480, nor one that didn't have touch, and never one with only 16,000 colors ( your computer can be lightning fast, but if you can't display all the colors of that movie or visualization - forget it). Pretty much the only system I can think of that could beat this would be an 8.4" 800x600 touch screen on the dash that could hook up to a computer with a lot of power and storage. Right now I'm limited to 30 gigs on a laptop hard drive. I dont' plan on using a desktop HD even though I could, because of shock absorbtion.
If I had a picture of this on the internet I would post it. Just hope you can all appreciate the uniquness of the display I've chosen and the rareity of such a thing at such a low price - honestly I've never found a similar display with a VGA input costing less than $995.