Quote:
Not a good idea mate. Imagine this, windows crashes......wtf are you gonna do? lol It is windows, it DOES crash and quite often too!
This is a myth. If you have properly setup hardware, and take care when setting up the system, and which patches you apply, Windows (as is linux) is rock-solid. I had to go ape**** with worldwide benchmark record-chasing to crash my systems, and those crashes were induced by clocking the daylights out of my system.
I find windows to be utterly stable and reliable - nope, I am not a windows zealot, I use Mac OS X, and Linux too....
To come back to the original question: It would be best if you can use something akin to the new Via Pico atx, or Commell LS-372 3.5" systems, and use Windows CE platform builder to rolout out an OS, which will be very quick on startup, you will be limited with obd-II applications on CE though.
You could use Win XP Embedded, the route I am taking, and strip out everything except what is necessary to display OBD-II data......
Enjoy.