Hardware

I didn't really use any special Hardware for the Mp3 Honda.  It's basically made up of spare parts I had just laying around.  I did use the best spare parts I had laying around and I'll do my best to explain why I used them the way I did.

Note: I used PCI everything because using ISA anything will slow down the overall performance of the PC...Including boot time.

Mother Board- I used an old Shuttle Motherboard I had laying around.  I believe it's a SHUTTLE HOT-555A MOTHERBOARD.  It's a regular AT board.  Nothing Fancy here.  Capable of taking a Pentium 233 MMX that I had laying around.  I think the AT power is good because you can just leave the power button turned on and as soon as the PC gets power it'll fire right up.  I'm sure there's a way to set up an ATX PC like that, but...this was easier.  :)

I guess it's a baby AT board, but it's not really that small.  I've got it in a huge ugly case anyway.

Processor- I used an Intel Pentium 233mmx for this because..well, like most of this stuff, I had it just laying around.  I figure if it ever dies on me it won't cost more than a few bucks to get a new one off Ebay or something.

Memory- Just threw in 1 32mb dimm.  To run Windows 95, you're not going to get much of a performance boost by going to more than 64mb.  All I'm doing is running Windows (barebones) and playing mp3s.  Any more and you're wasting precious seconds on boot time counting memory.  At least that's my reasoning.

Hard Drive- Beleive it or not when I first came up with the idea that I'd actually try to build an Mp3Car I built a computer with 4 hard drives in it.  That was bad for heat reasons, power reasons and I think one of them eventually started to die.  At the Time 6.4gb hard drives could still fetch a fair price on Ebay, so I sold 2 of them there and took the $180 I got from that and bought a 20gb 7200 Maxtor drive.  7200 RPM was important to decrease boost time.  Going to a 7200 drive actually shaved off about 5 seconds on boot time.  It's been solid and Maxtor has a good 3 year warranty where if you happen to crash a drive they don't ask if you've been cooking it by running it in the trunk of your moving car in the middle of the summer. 

Network Interface Card-  I threw a Linksys LNEPCI2 - EtherPCI LAN Card II (Combo) card in here.  It's a card I had left over from the old days when I needed a NIC with a Coaxial connection on it. 

Sound Card-  Creative Labs PCI 128.  Solid Cheap Sound Card.  Don't want to go too cheap here.  Stick with the brand name Creative Labs.  Good quality sound.  Great price.  Had to be PCI, a ISA sound card can REALLY slow down a system.

Video Card- I'm fairly certain I've got a little Diamond Stealth 3d 2000.  Why is a video card important when you don't have a monitor in the car?  Well, troubleshooting for one.  It's nice to have a 14" monitor you can throw in the trunk just in case something's going wrong.  Also I chose this video card because it doesn't have any kind of display on boot.  Some Cards have a memory count, or a splash screen that shows what kind of video card it is.  Again, this wastes valuable seconds of boot time. 

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