In article ,
"Jim Burns" wrote:

Or in IMC.... on our trip back from Michigan I needed to shoot the GPS 3
into STE, so I loaded it up in the KLN94 and thought I'd follow along on my
FlightPrep system on my laptop. So I switched from the XM weather page to
the approach plate but was still too far out for the little magic airplane
to appear on the plate. Ok, switch back to the XM weather just to make sure
we'd be on the north side of the approaching thunderstorms, yep, plenty of
room to get around them... switch back to the approach plate.....

You guessed it.... crash... darn Microsoft... so I had to put the toys
away, get serious, and fly the approach "for real". So, until the plates
come in an affordable panel mount system, there will always be paper in my
airplane.


Though I'm not Windows fan, I believe that Avidyne and others use
Windows as the foundation for their avionics systems. However, they
strip out all of the junk that normally accumulates on a PC and are left
with a fairly stable (and hardened) system. I suspect that you could
approach that level of reliability if you did the same--stripped the
system of everything but the FlightPrep, WxWorx, etc. But then, that
would remove most of the non-aviation utility from the system.




JKG