Quote:
Originally Posted by dustinp  I have finally decided on what I want to do. . . (no really this time)  I am buying a new laptop, I need one anyway. . .but it has Vista are there any of these Nav. programs that will run on Vista? If not my friend has a program that will allow me to Run XP inside of Vista. . .sort of the way macs can run XP. . . anyway. . .I havn't narrowed it down to what software I want. . . I have been looking at CAPN and Nobeltec, both of which are about $500. . .Are these any better than the MapTech O.N. software? I have heard that certain "charts" arent as accurate. . . So my set-up will be very simiar to yours. I have found 8-12" 12V LCDs on e bay that will accept a VGA signal. I will mount one of these at the cockpit and also have the ability to toggle to my 32" Hi Def LCD TV below that also has a VGA input. . .so with wireless keyboard and mouse I can plot on the 32" when I have shore power, etc. and to sweeten the deal I found a wireless mouse that runs up to 30' away from the source that you can grip in your hand it is controled by some sort of gyro. . . so you can adjust it's sensitivity when you are at the wheel (looking at the small screen) and you just move it around (sort of like a sword) and you can point and click all you would like. . . it is about $100 at circuit city. . .mabye less on the internet. . . so if I have all of that flexability the only downside to this setup may be that the screen may get damaged from the elements right? ? ? |
Dustin,
You can get XP instead of Vista on your new laptop - most vendors are offering it, as Microsoft has been "forced" to extend support for it since many, many major enterprise customers are refusing to migrate to Vista before it's ready (i.e., they're waiting until the bug fix Service Pack 1 has all its bugs worked out. My company won't move until summer 2008 or later).
And yes, you can run virtualization software like VMWare so you can run XP as a guest OS under Vista, but you'll need a license for XP also to be legal. As far as I know, Maptech's Chart Navigator Pro runs fine under Vista (I'm running it under XP now, and am testing it under Wine on Linux). Most of the other vendors' most recent versions of their nav software run on Vista now. I just wish someone would support Linux natively (GPSNavX - are you listening? OSX is BSD - porting to Linux would be trivial, and it could double your marketshare!!!).
And your 8-12" LCD for the cockpit? I'd say don't skimp - get a waterproof, sunlight viewable one for that application - but it seems that such an animal is just as expensive as getting a chartplotter from Garmin or Raymarine. Since the guts of a high-powered PC nowadays retail for only $100-200, you can see that the majority of the cost of a dedicated chartplotter is the weatherproofing and the sunlight-viewable display. What a drag...