I just had to comment on this post as I am sure the empeg folks are much to dignified to respond - there is no reason to get "nasty" with them as they have been wonderfully answering questions. Maybe you should look at other units that are better designed - oh! wait - there are currently none of production quality. I think you should wait for something "better" to come out.

But - should you be at 2500 of below just let me know if I can have your slot as I think this is a wonderfully planned unit and meets the task of playing MP3's in a mobile environment wonderfully.

As for your specfic questions -
Want to monitor your car - get a LowJack/On-Star or wait for some add-on to the AutoPC for Microsoft. As Hugo said - not many people have lans and do you think that everyone has a garage or let alone a HOUSE?

If you think you have so much music you can fill up the unit then you should plan for a larger unit - for what it costs for a IBM 340mb PC Card drive you could upgrade your Empeg by ~2gb or 34 hours of music.


As for tansfer rates - I did some test calculations -
At 115200 serial rates it would take the following time to transfer 4GB of data:
578 minutes
9.6 hours
.401 days
So my best guess is that you get a USB compliant OS on your machine - but if not it's somewhat like a swimming pool - it takes forever to fill it up the first time but then you just have to "top it off" ever once in awhile with new songs.

I hope that I havn't wasted *your* time with this lengthy post.

David