I just stumbled to this site looking for information on installing a carputer - mostly for GPS use. I currently have a small form factor AOpen that isn't getting a lot of use, but was concerned about using a standard ide drive. I'm amazed at the notion of using CF instead. My questions are: how do you get away with using a 1GB CF for WinXP when the minimum is 1.5GB? Doesn't performance suffer? Since GPS maps can eat a lot of disk space, on what type of device does your data reside? Also, what is the life expectancy of a CF getting day to day use? Sorry for being so basic, but this is all very exciting!
Using nLite you can create XP installations as small as 300MB (some have gone even smaller!!!). Using the latest SanDisk CF card, the Extreme III, I get an 18 second cold boot on a Via MII measured from the BIOS POST to when the Explorer shell comes up. The Extreme III comes in 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB configurations. If all you want your system to do is navigation then you could get away with a super small nLite XP installation plus the GPS software and it could potentially fit on a 1GB disk. Using EWF from XPe we can protect the CF card from writes to improve performance and to extend its life. Read through a few of the threads in this OS forum and you'll find lots of interesting info.
Are you from Ontario? If you are close, you can get great deals on CF from THIS PLACE and do local pickup. $105 CDN and no shipping for a 1GB Sandisk Ultra II sounds good to me...
A heads up for anyone doing this in cold cold Canada: You can buy an external USB 2.0 40GB HDD from Costco right now for $139 - not a bad deal at all and it is a perfect media drive for the purpose of this thread! Nice and small and it comes in a leatherette case for portability.
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