MS Street & Trips 2009 with Plug-In GPS Receiver $74.99
You can put it in your laptop or netbook.
Anyone use this?
What are your thoughts on this?
Streets and Trips is great for route planning. I used it to plot out my drive to Florida. You can specify how many hours you want to drive per day, and have it schedule breaks every few hours if you wish.
You can even enter in the size of your gas tank and your approximate fuel efficiency, and it will warn you where you are likely to run low on gas.
With an internet connection, you can also download construction information.
If you use it for work and have to visit a lot of different addresses, you can simply enter all of them into Streets and Trips and it will figure out the most efficient route for you to take to visit each location.
There is also the added benefit of being able to plot out a trip using a larger screen and an actual keyboard, rather than trying to do that on a small touch screen.
Negatives? Well, if you plan to use it on the road, you need space in your vehicle for the laptop.
Some Garmin devices support importing routes created in Streets and Trips. That's what I do for road trips. I don't take my laptop in the car with me.