This is not news. Anyone who has used Garmin's Basecamp knows that it is excruciatingly slow to load at the very best of times. I have discovered why.

I'm waiting for it to load right now. I've been waiting for nearly five minutes. It has finally reached a point where there is a Basecamp window on the screen and it's trying to draw the map.

What's taking so long? Well, I'm copying a very large file (1.4GB map file) from one directory to another on the system drive. Copying, not moving, so it is both reading and writing on the same drive that Basecamp is trying to load from.

There is virtually no activity on the CPU. It's mostly idling with occasional bumps to a few percent usage.

Basecamp is disk I/O bound.

Whoever wrote this thing knows nothing about how to do disk I/O. While the file was copying I was able to load, check and exit a couple other programs with no difficulty, including Garmin's Mapsource. Yes, they loaded more slowly than usual, as to be expected. But not like Basecamp.

Basecamp is bad when there is no other activity on the disk drive. It's dreadful when there is something else also accessing the drive. Dreadful?? Ridiculous!!

...ken...