gps for laptop/car ?

[bleuless]

i've seen a few of the companies out there that makes these gadgets, anyone has indepth knowledge about the downfalls and upsides on each company or models? i am mainly looking for a unit to be mainly used IN the car and with a laptop, since just a receiver w/o display unit and i/o interface can dramatically cut cost. i've seen one that can act like a LO-JACK, anyone have anything better? advices? warnings?

i am going to use my laptop in the car for my mp3s, movies, and gps... and possible car tuning features.

 

[Nefrodite]

well your really just buying an antenna thing for your laptop. iha ve an old one i got on clearance .. rand mcnally i think.. it came with streets deluxe or something, half way decent software, and it lets me track where i'm going pretty well. find food/gas/etc places pretty easily. its kinda old though.

i'm sure newer software has kewl features like voice recognition(very important) and other kewl stuff. theres a standard comm protocal for software to use gps things on laptops or whereever

i tried ms streets and trips 2001, it sucked royally.

 

[iamwiz82]

Delorme is voice activated, requires no antenna on your car(if you place it in the front or rear window), has turn by turn direction announcement.

Garmin also makes some awesome products. The Rand McNally one is on the lower end.

Delorme's Street Atlas Deluxe

 

[ttn1]

I've used the Rand Mcnally reciever with both their software and Delorme's one version old road warrior edition.

The reciever works great. The RM software is much more accurate for placement of businesses than the delorme
software. Delorme seems to have a serious case of dyslexia, meaning that alot the business locations are on the
wrong side of the road. The search feature with Delorme was also much slower and harder to use than the RM
version.

High point of the delorme software were the voice directions. Pretty cool when you don't have a navigator in the car.
Also the voice recognition to control the software worked pretty well.

All in all, I have loved having the GPS available. It has gotten me out of a few nasty wrong turns. It also found an
autoparts store that my car could limp to. I knew the problem, just didn't know where any autoparts stores were.
Fixed the problem and got back on the road with minimal headache. The automatic highlighting of restaurants and
gas stations when on the highway is nice to. I like the find all Arbies within 10 miles feature.

edit: grammar

 

[allisolm]

bleuless- you asked for information about deals on a GPS in the "I Wanna" thread in Hot Deals. Unfortunately you don't have private messages enabled or an email address listed and the rules don't allow for replies in the thread itself. If you'll edit your post there to include contact info, you might get some help.