Carputer and Fast Booting Tips
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| Tools Needed: |
| Root/Admin rights |
Time
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Duct Tape
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Isolation Mounts
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| The case mod above was preformed
on a 1U rack chassis, that would later become a carputer.
Rackmount chassis architecture works well for car computers
despite their large size. They are built with cooling,
reliability, and performance in mind. With a few modifications
they can also be very robust ruggedized servers, perfect for music,
GPS, DVDs, or mobile file sharing. |
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| The number one thing to keep in
mind while constructing your carputer is, the harsh environment it will
face. Often addressed are the non-conditioned power the system
will use and even the heat. What is overlooked by a lot of people
is vibration, and shock. The same stresses that can destroy a
hard drive can in time also cause a wire to rub through and short.
The first line of defense against this is securing everything you
can. I prefer to use duct tape in the areas where I can.
Care must be taken to avoid areas there it could become a short
risk. Zip-ties will help with any areas where duct tape is
un-suitable. |
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next line of defense is isolation mounts. These tiny mounts will
not only dampen vibration, but also deflect shock. Often used in
military application, as well as high end home audio, they are prefect
for protecting your mobile electronics. |
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| Fast Booting Tips |
| A fast booting system is a must
in a car computer or ruggedized workstation. In this area *nix
operating systems, unix/solaris/irix/linux, have the edge. Sub 15
second boots are obtainable under those operating systems.
Windows while not my preferred beast, is better suited as an OS
for most car computer applications. Lack of drivers, x-fi
creative labs/SRX wireless/misc, make windows a smoother deployment.
Keeping in mind the need for scalability, there are a few simple
tricks to speed booting. Due to motherboard and chipset
differences we will focus on software tweaks here. In windows a
tool called bootvis can speed up your boot time in a few steps on its
own. Before you do that, its a good idea to run msconfig.
Make sure fastenable and nogui are enabled. Beyond that,
stop any services from running at start up that you don't need.
From the same utility you can also stop any programs from self
launching. I was able to save 26 seconds with just those steps on
an AMD 2800 system. |
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