> At home i have a MAC. Bob, Too bad you went over to the dark side on your boat! We have been using our PowerBook 3400 on the boat for almost 3 years with no problems. I now have two Imacs and intend to use one of them in the pilot house for navigation. I think the bigger screen will be better. I will have to use a USB to serial adapter since the Imac has no serial port. We'll see how it goes. I'll have to fasten it down more securely as well, the laptop just sits on a rubber place mat and doesn't move. I have had a desk top Mac on the boat since we bought it. I replaced it with a G3 last year. No problems except the internal battery died and had to be replaced. The scanner and printer have worked well in the maritime invironment as well. Merry Christmas to you and yours, -- Dolph and Beverly McCranie M/V The Right Whale (KK 48 Whaleback)

After lurking about this list for a couple of months, I thought I'd try to contribute a little bit. I've been boating, with some gaps, since the early 70s. Progressed from a Hobie 14 to a Cal 20 to an Ericson 29 when I lived in Hawaii. Since we've moved to Portland, OR, we've had a SeaSport 22, a SeaSport 27, and now, our "last boat", Voyageur, a Grand Banks 42, single 3208TA with bow thruster. Our cruising area has been, and will probably remain, the Pacific NW. In 1999, we made it to Glacier Bay, Alaska which has been a long time dream of ours. We'll be going back in 2000. This year was our first with a computer on board. I've been into computers as a hobby since 1978, but didn't think they would stand up to the rigors of cruising. But, I was finally seduced into trying one by those beautiful raster charts and the neat software available now. We chose a Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop with a 15" active matrix screen, and we've been delighted with it. It sits on a R.A.M. mounted stand that we purchased from Captn Jacks (more about the stand later), and is powered through Voyageur's inverter. We feed two discrete DGPS signals into the Dell via a A/B switch. The Dell, in turn, feeds the Raytheon autopilot. The Dell also feeds an OceanPC daylight visible flat screen display at the upper helm. The software is controlled by a Logitech cordless trackball which works very well even from the upper helm. Captn Jacks is the only place I've ever been able to find one. We bought ChartView Pro, Visual Navigation Suite, and The Capn. All looked good in their demos, but I didn't want to end up on a 4 month cruise with a piece of software that I didn't like. They all have their good points. Each on does something better than the other. But our choice became The Capn because of the way the Raytheon autopilot uses waypoint numbers. The Ray needs to see a numerical value in the waypoint place-holder in the NMEA string. If it doesn't, it won't advance to the next waypoint. The Capn keeps the waypoint number intact and still allows the waypoint to be named. The other two overwrite the waypoint field with the waypoint name. With a good DGPS signal, the performance was incredible, and still very good with just GPS. Every evening we would plot the next day's route and print it out on our little Canon BJC50. In case the computer failed, we would still have heading and ETA estimates without having to scramble around too much. We find that if we plan an SOG of 8.7 kts average, our ETAs and ATAs are very close. We would also print out the next day's tide tables for departure and destination, and any current tables that would be of value. Am I anal? You bet! But I'm also a retired airline captain who knows that pre-planning is about 90% of the battle. This system works really well for us, but is likely a bit much for most people. About the laptop stand. It's a lexan tray with a pad of some material that is *very* sticky. Not to the touch, but it just seems to hold whatever is put on it. A very good friend and I had just installed the R.A.M. mount base and had clamped the tray into place. We put the laptop on the tray to check for clearance. I had ducked my head under the counter to tweak the retaining nuts a little tighter when my friend screamed "Holy S**t!". We had not tightened the clamp enough and the tray had tilted past 45 degrees. The laptop never moved. The tray comes with straps that we never got around to putting on. Through sheer stupidity we got caught in a gale in Clarence Strait north of Ketchikan and were heading into 8-10 foot short period, very steep seas with lots of spray soaking the upper helm. After about 15 minutes of trying to carry on to our destination, we opted to turn downwind and head for Meyers Chuck instead. Again, the unrestrained laptop never moved. Mike & Lily O'Reilly Voyaguer - GB42 Portalnd, OR