Want to put a desktop in my RV - convert to carpc?

**ABTsportsline** · 07-12-2009, 01:06 AM

Hello everyone,
My RV has a deck in the cab, and that is fine. i have two LCD tv's (one fore and one aft). i plan on running both off a PC in the RV. I already have a home theater PC at home that i'm not using anymore. It's a very nice stainless case that was built with 2 Gb of RAM, 1 TB of storage, the whole 9.... so i figure why not just use that? This PC will only be used when i'm parked in an RV park and either running off the generator (which provides 110v) or plugged into park power. Now, here's my question. the CarPC in my other car has quick boot-up time (like 10 or 15 seconds) and when power is disconnected from the car, it does a proper sleep mode like 5 seconds after i pull the key out of the car and remembers where i was. my home PC will take a good 2-3 minutes to boot up and you cannot just remove power. How do i make my home theater PC act like the car PC with regards to powering on and off?

the only other question i have is how do i do dual monitor output (i want the output video signal to go to both monitors at the same time). i will do the same thing with sound (putting a computer surround sound system in each part of the RV) - but i'd need two separate sound outputs. do i buy two video cards & two sound cards, or is there a video card with two simultaneous outputs and a sound card with two simultaneous outputs? thanks!

EDIT: OR would it make more sense to buy a 1 or 2 year old laptop, swap out the HD for a huge 1 TB unit, and just take advantage of it's low power usage and easy sleep/awake abilities? then just hook up the sound & video output to a splitter or something....

**vdubvan** · 07-19-2009, 08:00 PM

I'm hooking a carpc to my campervan. I know it's not the same, but I'm planning on using a laptop and a touchscreen in the front. I don't know how large your rv is, but for me space is premium.

The other reasons I wanted a touchscreen up front was to give me GPS and a rear view camera for parking. The laptop will be removeable since I hardly ever use my van.

There are plenty of dual-monitor graphics cards out there, I used to have a Matrox g400 and it was great. See if you can find one on ebay or something. It had two vga outs, and you could clone or have an extended desktop. The second VGA also had a VGA-RCA/S-Video adapter in case you wanted to use a television.

Why do you need two sound outputs? It seems too redundant to have two sets of speakers in the vehicle.