Glenn A. Heslop wrote:
I remember reading an article in one of the sailing rags on how to build
your own boat computer using a flash memory card...no spinning disk, no
fan...minimal opportunity for salt-water corrossion.

Anybody remember what magazine and issue, or where to get such plans?

Glenn.
s/v Seawing
www.seawing.net

There are a few different ways of acheiving this these days. Personally
I'd take the bootable USB flashdrive approach. There are a number of
advantages to this - for one just carrying the USB device around allows
you to 'boot up' anywhere there is a compatible motherboard. A 2 gig
flashdrive would give enough capacity for a windows operating system
installation and a few small applications and can be had for under
£100 - In the US of A about 1/2 that. In the US a 4 gig drive is
around US$200 and an 8 gig can be had for $489 see
http://www.supermediastore.com/2gbpendrive.html

8 gig is more than my last business laptop had and it still serves me
well as a carry around tool!

The first thing you need is PC with a motherboard that is USB boot
compatible. There are several approaches - a standard motherboard, a
laptop, one of the boat PC's or car PC's on the market today or a
specialised small form factor PC such as PC104. The specialised
products will have more power efficiency since they are generally
designed to run from non mains supplies.

A google of 'Bootable USB' or 'boot from USB' will return a good list
of reading.

Try
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~shaher/Bootable_USB.html

http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardwa...omusbstick.php

A helpful article can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device.../usb-boot.mspx it is
interesting to note that this MS article is 17 months old and is
already well behind the technology curve.

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/fi...oad/20306.html

Ian