Our Navigation Computer:

This one is a Dell Inspiron 5100 with XP on a Pentium 4, 2.66GHz processor with a Gig of RAM driving the Nobeltec Navigation suite all beefed up with all the cool charts of everything on the left coast from Alaska to Mexico and of course all of the Hawaiian Islands.

The Nobeltec takes a direct GPS signal from our Garman 128 from the multiplexer and an icon of S/V Sapien appears on the screen at your present position. It is so accurate that we navigated at night up inside the California delta, although the people that make Nobeltec would never tell you to do a damn fool thing like that, I mean without other forms of navigational aids. I think the bottom line is that we went from San Fransisco to Decker Island, back to San Fransisco, over to Oakland, all over the bay 100's times, down to Monterey and back, to Hilo, HI, then to Kailua- Kona and finally to Oahu where she lies today. We've never been lost with this set up and I guess that's really the bottom line here.

This website was built on the boat, at the dock in all the ports mentioned on this site using Dreamweaver MX by a couple of self-taught, semi-web-literate people with good overall computer skills. We do all of our graphic manipulation with Adobe Photoshop, but we have the whole Adobe graphics suite. We tried GIMP, but couldn't get into the flow and gave up.

We run Firefox as a web browser and pirate any and all wi-fi signals. Pirating makes boating more fun.

Our main challenge with this computer was powering it at first but we changed the primary power source to take the draw from the house off a standard lighter style plug. In the end we found the only real draw back from doing it this way was the fact that it would only draw enough to charge the batteries when the engine was running and charge just enough to maintain a charge while the engine was not running. The direct result of having a small inexpensive inverter.

Here'r the specs...

OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 1 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name DELL
System Manufacturer Dell Computer Corporation
System Model Inspiron 5100
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 9 GenuineIntel ~2657 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Dell Computer Corporation A22, 8/19/2003
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Total Physical Memory 1,024.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 779.94 MB
Total Virtual Memory 3.40 GB
Available Virtual Memory 3.04 GB
Page File Space 2.40 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys