ideas for all
 

Hey all, heres an idea for you guys that I love. If you have a laptop, i mounted it in my W126 with a mobile desk from www.a2zsolutions.com The mount ran about $200, and its non drill, which is good to preserve the car as much as possible. For those who have an older car like myself, a W126, and don't want to spend thousands on a little lcd for gps/dvds and everything. This is about a $1,400 solution.
my IBM T21 was $1,200. I of course have tons of mp3s on it, and used a cd player car kit to hook it up to my stereo. It also has an infrared port on the side (left side, how convenient) to communicate with other laptops. After tweaking the settings, i put it on a com port and now it can read infrared commands from any household remote control. With this, i can control winamp and dvds from my car with a sony remote control.

Second, for all of you gamers out there, best buy sells a relatively cheap usb hub for laptops, $20 for 4 ports. If you get www.epsxe.com a playstation emulator, and two controllers like a playstation controller (gravis eliminator, exactly a PSX controller) you can play nearly any psx game on the laptop for your passengers. Its 5x better than bleem. It ran 18 of my 20 games perfectly.

GPS:
There is a $90 GPS receiver with software from http://www.randmcnally.com/ which I got at best buy for $90 again. It hooks up to the serial port so its comatable with almost any laptop. As for software, you can use the software that came with it but Microsoft has awesome software called Mappoint which works perfectly for it, as it is NMEA stardard to work with almost any software you like.

DVDS, well, my T21 has a dvd player =P

Hey bro - I read every word you said but still couldn't understand half of what I read.

What did you do to the 126 with your laptop and what about the GPS?

(Hope you'd have some pics to enlighten us).

Hey, i just took some pics for you guys:

http://home.adelphia.net/~nychis/Clip.jpg

http://home.adelphia.net/~nychis/Clip_7.jpg

They're pretty blurry because it was with a webcam

All I did was buy a mount that uses a fork which fits under the bottom black seat track bolt (which i majorly messed up). But then i just bought a GPS receiver which hooks up to the back of the laptop through rand mcnally. It just hooks up to your serial port and mouse port, mouse to get power, and serial to communicate with your computer. It's pretty nifty.

Thats not a bad idea.

I am putting a full desktop system built into my friends tahoe.

This is a competition vehicle I am helping him build up.

Alon

How do you drive and work the laptop at the same time?

welp, I don't really drive and work it at the same time, because I got any household remote control to work to control it. I just use my sony stereo remote to control winamp, dvds, and even my GPS. So I never have to touch the keyboard :)

Like the GPS option. Sure would be paying the 300 - 400 bux for the Garmin unit that I've been drooling over. :D

I like the idea of the GPS on board, but I do note that it takes up quite a bit of space. Doesn't it?

how much space it takes up all matters on your car model. If you throw it in your W126 like mine (300SEL), it honestly takes up near to no space. It doesn't cramp the passengers legs at all, it sits in the very very left back corner of the foot space. Heres a good picture of how it's set up:

http://www.a2zsolutions.com/desks/fl..._Lincoln_3.jpg

It's not the same model, but it uses the exact same base. So, it really doesn't take up any room at all :)