Ewald42

My sympathies and prayers go to his family and friends. I never met Demon in person, but at times I frequently chatted with him daily. Fare the well O|||i||O my friend.

I came across this post when Totem Lake linked it in chat. The original poster is from my home town. I understand his frustration. In the short time I have been caching it is clear to me that there are a number of people in our area who are ethically challenged. There are definitely people who over aggressively seek FTFs. There are people who post finds online who never sign the physical logs. There are people who regularly put out new caches and never maintain their existing hides. There are people who only give information with the chosen few. There are people who have no regard for the rights and concerns of the owners and managers of the properties upon which caches are hidden. In short people exhibit the egomaniac personalities that can be commonly attributed to a given percentage of the population of the greater Chicago area. I do not know what that number is, but I suspect it is evenly proportional for cachers and muggles alike. With that said most geocahcers here I have met, are decent people. I seek caches as a form of solace from the rat race. I do not allow the actions of others to infringe on my enjoyment. Venting in forums or chat may feel good at the time, but ultimately only serve to feed aggravation.

I have the 400t and the 2.04 update did solve a lot of problems. Honestly most of the complaints I see now seem to fall in the "it doesn't scratch my ich the same way as my old XYZ" For me it is a quantum leap from what I had before. I was out today with people who had 60's and 76's and I felt no regret at all.

I have the Colorado 400T with 2.04 bios. It comes with Topo 08 installed, but just last night I purchased the City Navigator North America DVD and installed all maps on my unit. The total file size was about 1.8 gigs. I am guessing my experience should be simmular to yours. I used a new 4 gig Scandisk SDHC card ($38 US Comp USA). This is the high speed card. I chose it because I have heard horror stories about load times with regular cards (8 plus hours). As is, the entire process took me about an hour an a half. I used the GPSr today and it worked fine. Observations: When I first tried connecting with Mapsource to the connected unit, it said I did not have room. This is because I need to choose the SD card of my connected unit from a drop down menu. When first loading, Mapsource defaults to the hard GPSr itself not the card. There simply wasn't enough room on the unit's hard memory for all that data. Make sure you select the right card/drive from the menu. Before connecting the GPSr I tried loading directly on the card with my computers card reader. I got an I/O error as my reader does not recognize newer high speed cards. I had to clear the I/O error before I could anything else. While the maps were loading to the connected GPSr's card I notice my computer about maxed out on resources and the core heated up quite a bit. My box is a P4 @ 3ghz with 2 gigs of fast physical memory and XP. I can see were computers with less horsepower may have a problem.