My Car Computer - Which is the Best Operating System?

When deciding on the components which you will use in your carputer, it is vital to try to consider the power required by every component. You have as much power as you need in the home, just waiting to be drawn from the nearest power socket, but in the car, you don’t have this luxury. It all comes from the car battery, which has a finite capacity.

The charge level of the battery is continually being topped up by the alternator while the engine is running. Car manufacturers normally equip their car engines with alternators which are rated highly enough to allow the fitting of additional electrical equipment. Fitting a carputer with a high power consumption, especially if you have a powerful audio system in your car, could result in the alternator being unable to supply enough power to maintain the battery in a fully charged state. It can also be difficult to ventilate car computers to get rid of the heat generated by the system, if they are installed in areas with limited access. It is thus recommended that a motherboard and processor combination with a low power requirement are chosen.

The down side of using a low power processor is that it is a lot slower than the processors used in the latest cutting edge desktop PC’s. This is not an issue for most of the applications which will run on a carputer. Computer games normally require intensive graphics processing. However, it is very unlikely that many carputer users will be interested in playing computer games in their vehicles. The ability to run the chosen operating system is therefore the main constraint which is imposed by the use of a low power processor and motherboard.

If You’re using an Apple Mac then you’ll want to use OS X. Statistically however, you are more likely to be using an X86 based PC.

With an X86 architecture, you can choose between MS Windows or one of the many Linux distributions. You can put together a pretty impressive system using Linux, but it can be a tortuous exercise to get it properly configured. To date, the software written for Linux has not been as good as the Windows software. For most people, MS Windows is the operating system of choice. It does not involve overly difficult installation and configuration, and there is a wide choice of application software available for MS Windows.

Windows XP is the best choice for the time being. Although SP1 for Windows Vista resolved many of the reasons for the poor reception Vista received when launched, it is still a resource hog. To keep the power consumption low, you should use a less powerful processor than the one in a desktop PC. It makes good sense to use XP for as long as it remains available for sale, as it will run better than Vista on a less powerful processor.

Windows 7, once released, gives every indication of running much better on lower powered hardware. Virtually every reviewer of Windows 7 Beta has noted it both loads faster and runs faster than Windows Vista. I concur with this view. I am currently testing the Windows 7 Release Candidate on an Intel Atom platform which is the same as the one I use for my carputer. So far, it has given me absolutely no cause for concern regarding lack of performance. Bear in mind that this is still Beta code and there is a high probability that there will be a further performance improvement once the code is optimised for the production version.

For now, my recommendation is to stick with XP until Windows 7 is released. If the Beta is anything to go by, the production version of Windows 7 should be rock steady and will not place too high a demand on a low powered carputer design.

For details on building and installing your own carputer, click here.