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I have a dell latitude in my truck. I have 2 drives in it...on internally one in the select bay. 160 gigs. I have it in a mini docking station under the front drivers seat. I have the power switch on the docking station wired to a stitch up front to turn it on, I thought about WOR but this is just as easy and if for some reason it locks up I can hit the switch and reset it. I picked up an automobile power adapter for it off ebay for it to supply power, I wired it straight to the fuse box and there is a disconnect switch in line so I could switch off car battery and run off laptop battery if I wanted to. I run a display and use IRman to control it. I can shut it down completely with IRman and dont have to hack into the system to shut it down. Dell uses a small magnet in the lower bezel to send to off if you start it with the screen closed and no external VGA hooked to it. I removed the magnet...pretty simple...and went into power management and have the screen blank after a minute. runs perfect. CPI's are cheap and work really good and are bombproof. I have 19,000 songs and I use palm amp on a m515 to manage the play lists and search for a song. I am adding a xenarc for the GPS functions and to manage the music as well. I suppose there are cons to a laptop but none that I can find. I can add a PCI card to the docking station if need be...have built in lan USB serial etc. I can pop it out and take it with for portable music/media, it is quiet runs for about an hour with both drives on its own power. For me it is the way to go.
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