I just bought one of these [ASUS eeePC 4G] mini-laptops (I waited until they were available in black). I have no intention (not yet at least
) of using it as a carPC, that's not what I bought it for... but it wouldn't be a bad idea, in many ways it would make a great carPC
1. this thing is so small you could mount it almost anywhere in the car. (get creative and you could mount the entire laptop in the dash
)
2. it is almost completely silent. it has a small fan but you can barely hear it (you would never be able to hear it in a car)
3. it uses very little power. instead of a large power brick like most laptops (which require 18v-20v@5A) the eeePC's uses a small AC adapter which outputs 9.5v@2.3A
4. comes with 512MB DDR2
5. it has a 4G solid state hard drive (there is an 8G model coming out soon)
6. built in SD card slot for additional solid state storage
7. built-in wi-fi (but no bluetooth)
8. has two mini-PCI-express slots (wifi card is in one of them, the other is free)
8. VGA output
9. 3 USB 2.0 outputs
10. 1 audio output, and 1 mic input
currently it's only available with a pre-loaded linux OS (proprietary, based on Xandros). it cold boots in about 22 seconds, resumes from standby in about 6 seconds
you can run windows on it as well. it comes with instructions for installing and tweaking windows. it also comes with a support DVD which includes all the windows drivers. next month they will offer models pre-loaded with windowsXP.
as far as performance it concerned, it's pretty good given it's size. it has a 900MHz Celeron-M ULV 353. don't let that clock speed fool you, it's based on the pentium-M which is much better than a Pentium-4. in benchmarks
it performs similar to a 1.5GHz Pentium-4
so yes you can get laptops with more power, but this already has enough power for the majority of carPC users. it runs audio, video just fine. once I install windows on mine I'll test iGuidance on it (but since I currently run it on my 650MHz P3 laptop in my car I have no doubt that it will run it with no problem).
