interesting experience with Garmin Mobile PC GPS on S5, N5

[Lazarus Long]

I have had Garmin Mobile PC running beautifully on my XP S5 for a long time. One of the big criticisms of GMPC was that it could only be installed once, then the product key would be used up, so you could not delete it on a computer then install it on a different one, or even recover it on the same computer if it was deleted or lost in a hard drive crash.

I got a used N5 a few days ago, and loaded the demo of Streets and Trips. Worked fine, but what a piece of crap it is compared to GMPC. I shopped around but GMPC is discontinued and getting very hard to find; none listed on Ebay when I looked and only a couple retailers still had it in stock, and were charging well above what it listed at when I bought it the first time.

So just for fun, I tried installing the copy of GMPC that I already own, using the same product key. IT WORKED and installed correctly, and allowed me to update to the latest patch off the Garmin support page. My N5 is a clean install of Win 7 Enterprise, so I had to do quite a bit of twiddling with drivers and eventually set up GPSGate in service mode to get GMPC reliably receiving data from the GPS. But it works, so now I have two copies of GMPC running on two different units, using the same product key.

Will it work for anyone else? I don't know, and I do not recommend you uninstall a working copy to test my theory. But if you happen to have more than one Viliv with a GPS receiver, and only one copy of GMPC, you might want to give it a try. I would be interested to know if anyone else has success with this.