Laptop v Mini Tower PC ?

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rjcoles

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I am trying to decide wether to have a laptop (15" screen) or a Mini Tower PC as the ships main computer centre. As quite a few of our trips will be days long both types will rely on the ships main battery bank via an inverter, but I would like to minimise battery drain.

The overall plan is to have 7" tablets that can be taken ashore and a main computer to run nav programs, act as an entertainment centre, and to talk to the SSB,GPS,Sat Phone ect. From previous fourm posts I will have an ALFA R36 and a Tube G to make the boat a wireless hotspot.

So the question remains Laptop or mini tower or do you have an different solution?
 
rjcoles said:
I am trying to decide wether to have a laptop (15" screen) or a Mini Tower PC as the ships main computer centre. As quite a few of our trips will be days long both types will rely on the ships main battery bank via an inverter, but I would like to minimise battery drain.

The overall plan is to have 7" tablets that can be taken ashore and a main computer to run nav programs, act as an entertainment centre, and to talk to the SSB,GPS,Sat Phone ect. From previous fourm posts I will have an ALFA R36 and a Tube G to make the boat a wireless hotspot.

So the question remains Laptop or mini tower or do you have an different solution?
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You need to compare the power consumption of them. I suspect the laptop's will be lower. Also, the PC's monitor will also need to be considered and will probably add 30+ watts to the total.
My laptop, a Samsung NP350 uses just 60w and is an excellent laptop and my other one is another Samsung - an R610, also excellent and both have been 100% reliable.
 
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Hi rjcoles,

Just get a laptop, then charge via your 12v system, no need for wasteful inverters. Remember your laptop typically runs at 7.5v - 9v DC via a battery. The charging is via mains AC, converted down to between 7.5v-9v DC… So your inverting up from 12v DC to 230v AC, which is then converted back down to 7.5v - 9v DC again… So… try one of these from Maplins in this instance:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/72w-12v-in-car-in-air-laptop-adaptor-with-usb-charging-socket-387730

You can get them from most online electrical stores too.

Hope that helped you.

Breizh :cool:
 
I go with the laptop run via a 12 volt power brick from Maplins or wherever. Be careful choosing the laptop as some HP laptops use an 18.5 volt power supply with a socket on the laptop which is not a standard size, so it will be hard to get a 12 volt power supply to match. There is no problem with either of the Acer laptops I have owned. Both are 19 volt powered with sockets for which the 12 volt supply has plugs. If power consumption is a real issue on long trips it might be worth looking at having a tablet running Navionics charts for navigation powered by a 12 volt to USB socket device.
 
If you're going for with with ssb & satphone etc then there's a lot to be said for building a mini PC. Not difficult from eBay bits or get one off the shelf. Mine draws about 1A, maybe just over 2A with the Samsung sa330 monitor. Powers through a 12v - 12v stabilised car PC power supply.
Major benefit is having proper com ports to talk to everything, and getting it all hardwired tidily. Using usb/serial adaptors to talk to satphones and radios can be an unpleasant experience.
And with a mini USB keyboard you get the chart table back.

As for a tablet, I've just splashed out on a xperia 10" and the Nexus 7 never gets touched now, well worth it. Computers onboard rarely get turned on now. As for media centre, I'm heading towards wiring in a Raspberry Pi for that, hopefully controlled wirelessly from the tablet.

All that wiring and fitting and fiddling is a load of work, but worth it IMHO, (sounds like you have more of an offshore cruising boat) afterwards you have an chart table without usbs and wires all over the place and a system which just works.
 
Norman_E said:
I go with the laptop run via a 12 volt power brick from Maplins or wherever. Be careful choosing the laptop as some HP laptops use an 18.5 volt power supply with a socket on the laptop which is not a standard size, so it will be hard to get a 12 volt power supply to match. There is no problem with either of the Acer laptops I have owned. Both are 19 volt powered with sockets for which the 12 volt supply has plugs. If power consumption is a real issue on long trips it might be worth looking at having a tablet running Navionics charts for navigation powered by a 12 volt to USB socket device.
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That was a problem with both Samsungs so I bought the cheapest replacement psu and robbed the cable from it. Sometimes you can find just the leads on Ebay.
 
I use a Toshiba laptop with the battery removed, less current draw when it does not have to charge the battery. Probably draws 4 amps though.

For the best system though I would agree with GHA. Mini computer driving a 22 inch 12 volt LED LCD TV. These TVs draw 17 watts! For navigation there is no substitute for real estate, now I would never consider anything less than 20 inches.
 
Hi Guys
I think I am sold on the mini tower plus an LED LCD monitor / TV.
I have spent the evening looking on ebay (and replenishing my wine glass) and ending up more confused - there are so many options available and I do not have the expertice to sort them out. All help recived gratefully, along with info on a forum spell checker!
 
GHA said:
If you're going for with with ssb & satphone etc then there's a lot to be said for building a mini PC.
Click to expand...

That's what I'd do in the same situation. Nothing wrong with just slapping a laptop on the table and plugging in the USBs, it's certainly easier, but personally I'm something of a perfectionist where wiring and electronics are concerned and I would want something that is installed and looks like it belongs.

I don't know what the current state of the art is, but I have (not on the boat, it was used for a data collection project and is now unused) a five or six year old "industrial" PC which is a metal box about 4" x 4" x 1.5" with four real serial ports, a conventional hard drive (laptop sized), usual video/mouse/keyboard/network ports and a pair of screw terminals on the back which accept "dirty" 12v. If I wanted a computer on my boat, I would be looking for this thing's 2013 descendant.

Pete
 
Forget both laptops and mini towers.

There are plenty of car pcs or mini atx pcs on the market. They have the advantage of connecting directly to the dc power supply and yet can be customised to suite every need.

Running the inverter underway just seems unnecessary and should it go wrong makes you reliant on it. Good to have but the more than runs directly of dc the better.
 
My first "tower" was a self build 2mb ram processor, with a 105mb hard drive and a 51/4 floppy drive.

My current tablet; an Asus Transformer T700; has more power / storage
than enough for nav. app's and a screen that is brighter than any of the I'pads.

Been there, done that. My first business computer in 1977 was an Apple with integrated screen,
processor and keyboard and one floppy disc drive. Times change but computer processing is
still on a steep upward curve.
 
rjcoles said:
Hi Guys
I think I am sold on the mini tower plus an LED LCD monitor / TV.
I have spent the evening looking on ebay (and replenishing my wine glass) and ending up more confused - there are so many options available and I do not have the expertice to sort them out. All help recived gratefully, along with info on a forum spell checker!
Click to expand...
This is the motherboard I used
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Ato...307791276?pt=Motherboards&hash=item3386f8e7ac

power supply and mini itx metal case from eBay as well, hard drive is solid state from maplins. longist bit was making a box to switch one of the com ports between gps, nasa Navtex engine and Ham radio, with a chip to change the ham radio voltage down to rs232.

but ip485 might be right, could well be something off the shelf from the car geeks which would suit the bill.

there were a few programs I needed which only ran on Windows so ended up with dual linux/boot.
 
ip485 said:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Car-Compu...4?pt=UK_In_Car_Technology&hash=item4aca50c6be

For example.
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From the original post "As quite a few of our trips will be days long both types will rely on the ships main battery bank via an inverter, but I would like to minimise battery drain."

What's this 1amp current consumption mentioned in a previous post - no way for any mini pc unless its 1amp at 230V ie 230watts or 20amps at 12volts!

The ebay unit requires 15amp fuse and has a 120watt psu so with monitor, is 2 or 3 times the consumption of a decent laptop.

Please make sure you check the power required by any mini pc, bearing in mind that with car pcs in particular, the engine will be running while they are in use.

Laptops are obviously built with low power requirements so I cannot see how a mini pc makes any sense if run off batteries.
 
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ianj99 said:
Laptops are obviously built with low power requirements so I cannot see how a mini pc makes any sense if run off batteries.
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If you have a low power motherboard you can come in below the draw of a laptop, especially with the monitor turned off most of the time.

Though probabaly for most "weekends , couple of weeks in the summer" boats it might not be worth the bother.
 
I have often looked at low power, fanless, solid state, home made systems. THere are a few websites specializing in them, you essentially buy bits and assemble them. You can get very high performance systems for modest cost, and there are power supplies designed to run from vehicle systems that would be perfect for use on a boat. You can also build them with specialist options like multiple serial ports which are still very useful on a boat.

This is one example http://www.cappuccinopc.com/ but there are plenty of others.

But in the end, I always come back to a laptop mostly because of the cost, power consumption and hassle of a decent display for a super duper mini computer.
 
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ianj99 said:
What's this 1amp current consumption mentioned in a previous post - no way for any mini pc unless its 1amp at 230V ie 230watts or 20amps at 12volts!

The ebay unit requires 15amp fuse and has a 120watt psu so with monitor, is 2 or 3 times the consumption of a decent laptop.
Click to expand...

GHA's system is atom based and uses a solid state disc. Even assuming the N/Z series I would have thought 2A was a more realistic target for the system as a whole than 1: Is it really 1 or 1 point something maybe greater than 5?

The PSU for the car pc is going to be rated at over the maximum draw of the computer and the fuse at over the max normal draw of the PSU. A computer is going to draw much more spinning up than it does operating normally so the PSU size doesn't indicate what the thing actually uses. As you say tho, car PCs are designed to be mostly used with an engine running so may not be ideal for the boat but GHA's system sounds like something that does work for this scenario.

Personally I prefer a laptop simply because I can take it to a bar to do my planning and so it's not left as a nickable item when I'm away from the boat, but serial port issues, especially where you have a lot of things wired up, might swing the decision the other way
 
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