For the past 3-4 years I have had a laptop hidden away in my little gokart of a car.

And I’ve really only used it as an excuse to play with software, gadgets and my car. I’ve set up general stuff like GPS, retrieving car stats, TV Radio receiver, games, bluetooth links all connected to a 7″ motorised screen.. I never really use the laptop in the car whilst driving even with its integrated GPS! I just get out my tom tom instead of switching on the 7″ screen and laptop..

The main reason is down to time.. I`m way too lazy to wait for everything to boot..
At the moment, the laptop is booting from a SD-IDE card and it takes about 20-30seconds.. but still you have the load time then the configuration I just get way too impatient.. Its great to show friends and geeks but in reality give me a radio headunit and a tom tom and that’s all I need maybe a bluetooth headset aswell so I don’t get in trouble with the police answering the phone

Anyways ignore my rambling above.

If you guys ever saw the iram drive… Google, youtube it… Its been around for years
It allows you to use RAM as a storage device and you can even install your OS onto it for supper fast response and boot times. Unfortunatly there is no laptop equivilent

So I`ve recently.. Well ok.. Today, I`v looked into the possibility of installing Windows onto the RAM of the laptop and it looks possible check out this article -

Boot into RAM with Windows PE

The only real problem is the laptop ram is cleared everytime the computer looses power.
This doesn’t happen with the ram drive which has a standby battery that lasts 7 hours, and there is always power going to your pc even when its switched off… unless you get a power cut.

But with a laptop you only want power going to it when the engine is on or you`ll drain the car battery.

So the plan is to create an image on cd and boot from ram if no os exists boot from CD and do a OS copy/clone onto the ramdisk and run it from there..

Its all still pretty much a concept but its looking possible.. I`ll just take the OS from the SD card and put that on CD and then us the SD to store all my media.

Before you guys ask why SD? because 2-3 years ago SD was cheap well ÂŁ100 was cheap for a solid state type drive.. If I went for a proper solid state back then it would of cost ÂŁ800+!! Also I couldn’t use a harddrive because I drive a goKart.. and the cold in the winter would destroy the drive.

I could afford a solid state one now ..

But the SD works just as well and for music and storage it doesn’t need to be uber fast!

About 2 years ago; whilst working on my incar computer with touchscreen display, I came up with this UI design.
I just saw it in my archives and thought I would add it to my portfolio

The software that I used until I dropped and broke my laptop was freedrive.
Unfortunately, all I have left is the photoshop template that I did for the skin so please don’t ask me to send or redo an updated version.