I read your article about the Lowrance I-Finder and Map Create 6 software and wanted to offer some additional experences.  I have a lowrance 3000mt global map with MC-6 software, and I purchased one of the newer 256meg secure digital chips to use with it.  I managed to select 239 meg and change worth of map data to download into the chip.  The chip indicated it had 241meg available.  I managed to get most of the east coast onto one chip.  My territory covers from just below Maine, all the way down to the tip of Georgia, and extends west about the width of the state of Pennsylvania.

I first tried compiling the map on my Laptop, which is a P3 pentium at 650mhz with 192meg of ram.  The program got almost half way through, and locked up. Next, I added an additional 128meg of ram, giving me 320meg of ram on the same system.  This time I got just over half way complete before it locked up.  My next attempt was on a newly built computer.  I put together a Pentium 4 @ 2.4ghz on a 533mhz font side bus with 512meg of DDR ram running at 333mhz.  A fairly modern computer and giving me roughly two times the memory as suggested in your previous article.  This computer was able to complete the map compile, but it took almost 45 minutes to complete.  I am going to double or tripple my ram at this point, but wanted to give a real world example of just how much horsepower this program takes to compile a map.

Lowrance should make it clear that you are not going to be able to compile a large map with this software unless you have a very modern computer with some real power.  Another interesting point is that after the compile, what was presented as a 239 meg map completed as a 221 meg file.