What can I do with this laptop?

**fliggil** · 06-19-2005, 06:38 PM

Hey guys, the prospect of building a carputer has been in my mind for a while, however funds just are not going to come through anytime within the next year, I just have too much else going on. Anyways, not too long ago my brother gave me his old laptop, a Dell PII 300 64mb ram, 4gig, USB and a CD-Rom drive. I just formatted it and put Windows 2000 on (it's the only setup disc I can find laying around here, and I know the specs aren't sufficient for XP). I already have a pretty decent setup in my car, a fold out 7" lcd, Panasonic CD/DVD/DVD-Audio headunit, Kenwood components in the front and 2-ways in the rear.

Is there anything worth while given the specs on this for using it in my car? I can pretty easily hook up audio and video, but is this sufficient for running a USB GPS system? Anything else you guys would recommend? If your advice is to buy a new computer, don't bother because as I said, it is not possible. If there's nothing worth using this for, I won't. Thanks-

**RS3RS** · 06-19-2005, 06:48 PM

I think it would work... I can't tell you for sure, but I'd think it would be enough power for a carputer. Using a non-VGA LCD won't give you very a high quality display though... It will work, but the quality is going to be pretty sad.

**Wiredwrx** · 06-19-2005, 07:23 PM

Originally Posted by fliggil

Hey guys, the prospect of building a carputer has been in my mind for a while, however funds just are not going to come through anytime within the next year, I just have too much else going on. Anyways, not too long ago my brother gave me his old laptop, a Dell PII 300 64mb ram, 4gig, USB and a CD-Rom drive. I just formatted it and put Windows 2000 on (it's the only setup disc I can find laying around here, and I know the specs aren't sufficient for XP). I already have a pretty decent setup in my car, a fold out 7" lcd, Panasonic CD/DVD/DVD-Audio headunit, Kenwood components in the front and 2-ways in the rear.

Is there anything worth while given the specs on this for using it in my car? I can pretty easily hook up audio and video, but is this sufficient for running a USB GPS system? Anything else you guys would recommend? If your advice is to buy a new computer, don't bother because as I said, it is not possible. If there's nothing worth using this for, I won't. Thanks-

You should be able to run a Navi program with the current setup.

Perhaps you can add some memory, 128 should be sufficient for most things.

You can probably use it for Winamp and music/mp3s as well. Not sure about what front ends you can run with out XP, perhaps most of them. Try them out, and see.

Michael