| Author | Message | ||
     Jamie (Rover_puppy) Senior Member Username: Rover_puppy Post Number: 660 Registered: 05-2003 |
If anyone else has been dealing with the same frustration I have experienced with Garmin TOPO software, I'll be glad to post the fix. I use several pieces of Garmin hardware along with several other Garmin software and MapSource products. The MapSource US TOPO has been a continual source of massive frustration for 2 reasons: 1) It is composed of 3 Disks. Disk 1 contains the setup files along with all of the image files for the Western United States. Disk 2 contains only image files of the Eastern US. Disk 3 contains only image files of Alaska and Hawaii. NONE of the image files from ANY of the disks load onto your hard drive when the Mapsource TOPO is installed and set up on your hard drive. This means that ANY time you are working on or using a map and need topo info, the program prompts you for the disk containing the files it needs. Needless to say, this is a pita - and almost impossible when you are mobile. In addition, the software had many kinks that made it lock up sometimes even when you fed it the disk - it couldn't find it. Since it froze up when this happened, bye bye map unless you've saved it each time you did even the smallest thing to it. 2) Garmin Mapsource products are interchangable - which is very handy when you need to make a map or have them available for various modes of travel and store them ALL within the same map. For example, if you are going into an area - you can have both the street/highway maps (from Nav MapSource software) loaded into a desired area along with TOPO info of the same area (from TOPO Mapsource). Since you have the info all loaded into the same map, you also have both available when detours, etc are necessary. Sounds great huh? Well, it wasn't because the program wanted to be fed disks whenever it accessed the info. Worse, whenever it felt like it, TOPO would crash all of the programs and freeze up your entire hard drive necessitating a cold shut down of hard drive. Unfortunately, TOPO felt like doing that alot. The guys at Garmin "could not" tell me how to do it - but they could tell me how I might "try" to do it. You know, of course, that they DID know how to do it and it worked!!  The wizards helped solve all of those problems, and it took some tricky configurations requiring total uninstall of all products, searching hard drive for ANY files that uninstall left behind and deleting them one at a time - then reinstalling programs in an unusual way, in a certain order, along with downloading an installing patches and updates in a certain order. It was a cumbersome process, but all appears to be working together without any problems. My TOPO software does not think all the image files are on disk anymore and retreives them automatically from my hard drive. All types of software are accessable from any map. So far, so good - but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. If anyone else has experienced similar problems and frustrations, I'll be glad to share the solution we found. I had just about given up - if I weren't so crazy about Garmin products, I would have ditched this long ago. BTW, I also got help getting RAVE disk on my hard drive so I don't need to carry the disk anymore. You all probably figured out how to do that right away though. I'm happy to finally have it on my hard drive - needed info is accessable fast since it doesn't have to load and search the disk. Best of all, no more fighting with my workshop manual Jamie | ||
| Max Thomason (Lrmax) Senior Member Username: Lrmax Post Number: 281 Registered: 11-2002 |
Jamie, Overall, I have not been impressed with Garmin Mapsource Topo. My Delorme Topo! 2.0 (made in 1999) seems to be better than the new Garmin Mapsource program. The Topo only shows detail in national park/forest areas. The rest of the areas is just all one big blob. One thing that I really hate is that the program won't even give you names of roads. They expect you to buy Mapsource Streets or something to that effect, i.e. another 100 bucks. Topo really doesn't show off road trails either, even public right of ways worth a darn. I am currently looking at other possible programs to become my primary software since mapsource seems to be severely lacking. The National Geographic Topo software seems to be of better quality in many respects. I looked on the website www.northbyrover.com and that is what they used. The maps look to be fairly up to date, user friendly, and contain more data. Does anyone have any experience with this software? Thanks. Max T. Overall, I give it a "U" for useless. | ||
| Jamie (Rover_puppy) Senior Member Username: Rover_puppy Post Number: 668 Registered: 05-2003 |
Max, I'm with you on the TOPO, not enough detail at all in my state! Surprisingly, my Garmin Street Pilot base maps do show incredible detail. It even shows the jeep and pig trails - including their location and trail names. (which is a big help getting out of the forest). That's one of the reasons I'm so happy to have it working together. Hopefully no more switching equip or software as needed. I think I will be pretty well covered by combining North America Navigator, TOPO, Street Pilot base maps, and Rino base maps. Let me know if you find 3rd party software compatible for Garmin Equipment, I might take a look at it!! Thanks, Jamie | ||
| Shawn McKenzie (Shawn) Member Username: Shawn Post Number: 170 Registered: 10-2002 |
Jamie, How did you put RAVE on your hard drive? | ||
| Chris W. (Dcwhybrew) Member Username: Dcwhybrew Post Number: 131 Registered: 05-2003 |
Shawn, just copy the files from your CD to your hard drive. I set up a new file folder under the C drive. Make sure you map your desktop icon to the executable program file. It'll have the green land rover oval with RAVE written on it. | ||
| Jamie (Rover_puppy) Senior Member Username: Rover_puppy Post Number: 670 Registered: 05-2003 |
Yep, that's what I did. Right click on desktop in an empty area. Choose create shortcut. Direct it to the .exe file where you put the program on your hard drive. If needed you can go into the shortcut, choose properties and direct it to the .exe file, you can also choose your icom (Land Rover green oval) in the same place. However, the first time you run it from windows, it adds the icon automatically if you created the shortcut as a folder. Oh, it makes looking stuff up so fast and easy!! You are going to luv it!! | ||
| Reed Cotton (Reedcotton) Senior Member Username: Reedcotton Post Number: 285 Registered: 01-2003 |
Another way you could do it is to create a 600 MB or so partition on some unused hard drive space then copy the CD into that partition as you mentioned above. It works the same way you have it, but the cool thing is that my new drive has the Oval icon attached to it in Windows Explorer. Of course you should then label the partition as drive "Rover(R " (not sure what happened here but the smily face is supposed to actually be a colon and a closed parenthesis.)???? Kids, please don't try this at home! Unless you have a good understanding of drive partitions. It has the potential to completely wipe out your hard drive. |
