I have friends who use the iPhone for geocaching and I think the HCx is more accurate and definitely faster to update coordinates.

I’m afraid I don’t have any particularly helpful insight on maps. I just bought the ones I needed from Garmin rather than attempting to find some way around it. I’ve got the routing US road maps and the topographical maps.

You have to switch between them, but both work really well. It’s a real joy to have maps on the GPS. Someday I’m going to have to update them, but they are a bit expensive.

Best of luck with your new toy!

Still, it’s never the GPS’ fault when I can’t find a cache.

It’s hard to diagnose the problem based on that info, but it sounds like there’s a problem with the CD ROM. Can you even browse in Windows Explorer to the CD? You should be able to run it from there if you can.

On the other hand, you might want to put your CD-ROM back to the right drive letter – that’s if I understand your problem – assuming nothing else it wrong, you can go into Control Panel, then Administrative Tools, the Computer Management, the select Disk Management (How easy was that?) and you should be able to see your CD-ROM and change the drive letter to suit your needs.

Good luck.

My buddy helped with the PC as I had issues and needed to roll back to XP from Vista. In the process of him fixing the PC I believe my F: drive was my C: drive but I can’t change the drive name back and I am afraid.

The darn CD does not allow you to select any option drive to load the program as I can do with may other CD’s.

Any way to do something to the CD to run the program into the F: drive?

I have not found a way yet.

Thanks.

It’s be so long since I wrote that review that, I can’t remember the specific example, but I’ll try to explain what I was getting at.

For example (and this is where I can’t remember the specifics), there are functions available on the GPS that are not at all explained in the HCx manual. I would find things on the GPS and go, “Hmmm, I wonder what that means?” and then pull up the manual to find it. No reference in index, and when I’d pull up the PDF of the HCx, search the PDF, there might be a mention in passing to the function as they go over the menu, but no explanation of what it does.

Hop to the older Vista C manual and you can find the function and the explanation. There was more that one instance of that.

I just scanned both manuals and didn’t notice anything obvious, but by now, I know the GPS backwards and forwards and don’t really remember what was once mystifying.

I’m not always a believer that longer is better when writing, but consider that the Vista C is a more primitive version of the same GPS with fewer functions, yet rates a manual twice as long as its more sophisticated counterpart. What did they chop out? Adjectives?

Is this the manual you have and deplore?

The Vista C manual linked in a previous post does appear to have about twice as many pages, but skimming through it, there’s lots of overlap between the two.

A thorough tutorial that takes you through all the features would be very helpful. Another friend has been using hers for a while. I’ll nominate her as my tutor and hope she accepts. Figuring out all the details on your own from scratch is challenging, to say the least.

John

It’s mostly about the Mac software I use with the Vista HCx.

Thanks,
Jay

A little awkward, but to be expected when there’s no keyboard.

Address searches, for example, present you with 3 entry fields: City, street name and number. (The fields displayed is flexible and changes based on the address format of the locale. )

As you enter in the city, the list of possible matches diminishes until you either pick from the list or the list is narrowed down until there is only one choice.

The same happens for street names (after you’ve identified the city). Once you’ve entered that in it gives you a list of potential matches – for example an address on N Main street versus South Main street.

I was wondering how to enter text in this gps device? Entering an address for a turn by turn navigation for example… Or do you need to enter this in your computer?

(1) I mention to appalling manual provided with the Vista HCx. It turns out I’m not the first to notice that. I was pointed to the manual for the now-discontinued eTrex VistaC, which you can find here – at least for now

It’s a very similar GPS, but the manual is actually useful. Shame on Garmin for not just updating this manual – it’s not like they had to write an all new one.

(2) There’s more information about the mapping products and software for this unit at my blog post, here.