T&T: 12v PC

[scottebulger@comcast.net]

Congrats George, you arrived almost exactly the same place I did a few years ago.  I researched the automotive market prior to buying my Toshiba tablet that I used in my Camano.  The reason I went with the tablet is I wanted the ability to bring the system home and do planning and simulation.  In hindsight it was a good decision, but you can achieve the same thing with the small form factor computer.  

A few thoughts:

a.  If you going to use CE, call Jeff or Brad.  They can probably get you a Radar that will work with CE and be as full featured as Nobeltec VNS.  I know they were working on it last summer, I talked to Jeff last week and he said they were getting closer and closer to releasing something every day.  I am likely going the same route with a backup radar on my Nordhavn as well.

b.  A word of caution:  Be certain you get a video subsystem that has lots of fast memory.  During tests I did two years ago, I was able to prove that VNS consumed the entire 1Gig processor of my Toshiba Tablet when I went to full screen Radar Overlay.  The system was very, very busy painting all those pixels.  I found out later the Open GL support lacked somewhat and the 64MB of memory was just not enough.  Since CE is a more efficient program, I suspect it won't suffer the same performance impact, but I'd want to see it running prior to making a purchase.

c.  Google xp tweaks and research how to disable  or tune swap and crash dump files.  With 8G of disk you will want to watch that carefully.  

All in all a great system, good luck, can't wait to see it!

Scott Bulger, Alanui, N40II, Seattle WA