Thread: What can your PC do

mine says "God bless you" when i sneeze

It takes about 10-30 minutes to rip a DVD movie. I have a 160GB HDD. That was the biggest harddrive avaliable on the market when I built my system. If I had to do it over again, I would use the Maxtor 300GB.

My system runs off a Fujitsu lifebook P5010D, with a DSCustoms 7" touchscreen mounted on the dash. It does

-Copilot 2003 (need a better GPS for that, I wish the garmins with configurable sentence output had a USB version, serial to USB converters are a pain in the ***).
-Winamp (Controlled by a Griffin Powermate and Girder to allow me to change songs without Winamp having focus. Also it has an OSD that displays song titles).
-802.11G.
-Netstumbler (for wardriving).
-Digital video (DVD/Divx/Mpeg/RM).

Features I'd like to add.

-Serial to USB converter that will work on an unpowered hub.
-Rear view camera.
-FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared Camera).
-All power tied directly into an always on circuit, controlled by a cover ed switch.
-A fresh battery to keep in the trunk for when I leave the damn thing on and kill my battery.

For those considering installing an LED scroll in their back window, It's probably illegal and the first cop that sees you drive past with "j00r K@r su><0rs" scrolling on it will pull you over and make you unplug it. You'll probably get a nice fat ticket too. Its a distraction to other drivers, and it's illegal to have cert ant colored lights on your car.

Originally Posted by cproaudio

It takes about 10-30 minutes to rip a DVD movie. I have a 160GB HDD. That was the biggest harddrive avaliable on the market when I built my system. If I had to do it over again, I would use the Maxtor 300GB.

What type of CPU are you running? For my main machine, I am running dual AMD XP1800's (Modded into MP's, so I saved ~$200 total, perhaps more ) so I can do video stuff easily.. I need to upgrade the chips and buy a nice ATA RAID card so I can raid my 2 60GB's, or get 2-4 120GB/8MB drives in RAID-0+1..

fluff, I take that you're using a pci 802.11g card right? That certain color you're talking about is blue or orange or strobing bright white lights. Red is always ok which is what most scrolling LED panels are. You're right though it is illegal to have a scrolling LED light mounted in the back of a car.
Sigma, I have a P-III coppermine 933Mhz. It does the job pretty well. I think anything faster than that is unnecessory for car use. the DVD rip is not gonna be limited by how fast your CPU is but rather by how fast the sustained transfer rate of your DVD drive. Sure a faster CPU will help but a 1800+ is overkill.

my carputer only does dvds, divx movies, mp3s, gps, games, ... thats it =T

I'm hopeing to add a wireless anything next. But we'll see

Originally Posted by cproaudio

fluff, I take that you're using a pci 802.11g card right? .

Actually I'm using the built-in Broadcom 802.11G card. The Fujitsu Lifebook is a notebook. I take it more or less everywhere I go, Then When I go on the road, I plug it into my car, (5 connections. 2 USB, power, sound, video) reboot into my car account and off I go.

I'm running windows 2000 if you're wondering.

I like using a laptop for my car computer system. It makes the computer more useful to me then a computer fixed in my car, and, I can take it with me if I park in a bad part of town. The downside is the fact I have no Serial ports, and the time it takes to connect and start up is higher then a fixed system. However, being able to get out of my car and leave only $100 worth of Car computer components inside is comforting. The fact that all a thief looking into my car will see a bunch of worthless cables coiled about helps too, especially when you own the most commonly stolen car in your country.

So which one do you drive? Accord or Camry?