I was curious how some of the more wealthy yacht owners solved the marine puzzle. What kind of computer would they use? What kind of parts would go in? What would a basic system cost? So I asked one, he opened up a compartment with a stack of cheap Acer laptops vacuum sealed in bags. They last 2 to 6 months, when they stop working he throws them away. The sealed one has everything installed, a full battery and will sync as soon as internet becomes available. When plugged into something the new laptop is never the problem. He spend a small fortune arriving at this solution.
Looked at doing this on a moderate sized yacht, before decent chartplotters were reasonably priced. We wanted to have a decent spec PC drive a chartplotter at the helm, nav table, TV in the living area. To build a PC that would survive was near impossible for a performant system. We were looking at fanless sealed industrial machines.
