On Jun 13, 7:30*am, Brad wrote:
Anyone else running XC flight software on a PDA find them to be
sluggish and almost unuseable during a flight? I am using an iPAQ 3850
running XC-Soar, the unit is hooked to a Garmin Map60CS. Sure
everything works, but while in the air, if I push a button or touch
the screen somtimes it takes several seconds for the function to work.
This often leads to stacked commands that eventually cycle thru, but
inevitably end up not on the command I wanted/needed.

Case in point: Mountain XC flight the other
day.....................middle of the Cascades and I am wanting to
look up my alternate airports/LZ's.............it is almost impossible
to get the PDA/software to do this. Instead I just used the GPS, which
has the same data the PDA has.

Is there some setting on the PDA to speed things up? I know there is a
setting to allocate more memory to the programs....could that be
tweaked?

Thanks,
Brad

If this is happening in flight when it is cooler it may not be the
issue but you can see this with some PDAs when they get hot and the
touch screen stops being reliable. I solved this with iPAQ 4700 by
using a platinum canopy cap to kepe them cooler before launch.

Sometimes people have stuff running on the PDA without realizing it
and some software has memory leaks etc. One thing you can do is to do
a soft reset (press the reset button the stylus) before your flight,
that seems to also reduce Windows Mobile OS crash/hang related issues.
Being Windows say a prayer each time you do this. I find overall this
is a good idea as it helps improve stability in flight.

Some older PDAs (including yours) may run applications slower from the
SD card than from the internal memory, but the SD card will have the
benefit of not losing memory if the battery goes flat (also not an
issue with the latest Windows Mobile devices running 5,0 or later).

There are memory settings in Windows Mobile in the Settings menu, you
can play with that but it probably won't make much difference.

Darryl