Software

When building a CarPC you need to consider the software carefully. Remember you will likely be using a far smaller screen than most operating systems are designed for. For this reason simply using Windows will be fiddly at best and more probably impossible.

There are several very good CarPC front-ends available and many are free. The one I have chosen is MediaCar. This is freely downloadable here http://users.skynet.be/media-car/software.html and is a very complete and user friendly system. It can be customised and skinned to suit your needs and has a winamp-based media player built in.

Once you've got the front-end sorted you'll need some software to handle other aspects of your build. I am still investigating these, particularly GPS as there is an abundance for pocket pcs and smartphones but little for the PC. MapMonkey is a free app using the Destinator SDK and can be downloaded here www.mapmonkey.net

For DVD playback I suggest PowerDVD as it integrates into MediaCar nicely, but any can be used really.

Finally, web browsing. This is tricky on a small screen but I have found Opera to be a good browser as it intelligently resizes pages. Alternatively if you choose to pay for a front-end Digital-Dash is very good and has a built-in browser. It's available here