The idea is to find or design a system that can be left on for extended periods of time without draining the car battery too much. The main reason for this is for remote music updating. I've tested this with my iPhone and the wifi reception is pretty strong from my router in the parking lot I keep my car in. If the computer was to be turned on in the middle of the night for updating the music wirelessly I would only need the motherboard and hard drive to come on. The screen, speakers, lights, and etc would remain off.
I've been looking the Asus Eee PC line as a potencial system for this purpose. Some of them are rated for a 7 hour battery life, so it could run on it's own battery when it updates itself at night and when I drive it during the day it would charge the battery back up.
What I'm wondering is if there is an even more power efficient then these mini laptops?
Fit-PC
It's not very powerful, but it's probably the smallest full Windows PC you can get. I run XP on mine and it would be perfect for music update. It uses less than 5 watts under normal load, takes 12v direct - no screen or keyboard, just a hard drive and wifi.
Oh and it's very small. You could keep it in your ashtray.
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The new fit-PC2 will be available next month. It has a 1.6GHz Atom, Wifi, DVI out, 1G ram, 160G drive. Runs on 12V and has 6 watts power consumption.
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my eee 900a gets about 4 hours web surfing with the wireless enabled. with no wireless and the screen turned off i would imagine it would be significantly more. worth looking into if you want a dirt cheap solution.
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