Any opinions, guys and gals, instead of a built-in unit?

 

well, where r u gonna place it?

 

Most likely in the glove box. I'm thinking of putting up a screen.

 

I don't know about laptops being that useful in the Z.

Here's my reasoning: how will you turn it on/off? You will have to get a docking station probably.

Anyway, if you already have the laptop I guess it would be ok. If you haven't spent the money for the laptop, its quite easy to build a car-pc for little money that can turn off/on automatically etc.

www.mp3car.com

you should check out that website.

 

JPerkins,

I have thought about taking the route of building a car PC too, I actually found a couple of site similar to mp3car.com. The only concern I have of building a car PC is the power supply part. I can build a PC with no problem, but I am not too sure about the automobile electrical portion.

 

What you want to do is buy an Opus power supply. That will connect to your battery and ignition switch and send auto on/off signals via your ignition. It will also keep the PC from rebooting from the low voltage during a crank.

I bought my opus from www.karpc.com.

It's pretty pricey for only 90w and 150w power supplies but its basically the best DC-DC power supply you can get.

You definitely want to check out the mini-itx boards and cpu's, laptop hard drives and such since they consume very little power and therefore put off little heat.

I have ordered my stuff but it isn't in yet. I basically got the
-Opus 90W open frame power supply
-VIA EPIA MII 12000 (1.2 ghz nehemiah processor)
-512MB CL2 PC2100 Ram
-80GB 2.5" laptop Hard drive
-Slim CD ROM
-Xenarc 7" Touchscreen with 16' extension cables
-Morex 3677 Black Case (comes with 60w DC-DC power supply but doesn't have the chip to control shutdown so I will be getting rid of the PS) It also comes with the adapters for the CD and Hard drive to mount the slim versions of hard drives and CD
-Illuminated short-slim keyboard
-USB Wireless adapter
-USB XM PCR (XM satellite tuner for the PC)

I need to get the 2003 Nav pocket and finisher to mount the LCD in the nav pocket (2004 is too small).

I am also installing a basslink in the stock bose sub location, crossfire vr354 amp (4x90) eclipse component 6.5"s in the front, eclipse mid-bass in the rears and an eclipse 8454 for the head unit.

This head unit has an aux input RCA's so I can plug my sound card output into it for volume control.

I already have a USB GPS receiver and Routis software so good to go there.

I'm pretty excited.

 

I plan to use a laptop that I have with a broken screen, that I dont mind damaging a bit more to wire something to the power switch.

I am not sure exactly my complete plans, but the laptop can last over 4 days on standby, and I can set it up to automatically go into standby mode x minutes after it loses power (turn off the car) and to restart when it receives power again (turn on the car)