Ability to track on downloaded maps offline on laptop

Is this even possible? I have the ability to download google maps no problem. (http://www.allallsoft.com/gmd/). I have a usb gps receiver. I can put it into google earth no worries, but caching google earth is too tedious for what i want to do. Are there any programs out there that allow you to upload google maps into it, and then use for navigation? Any I really would prefer a free or cheap option. I have oziexplorer but it is not really what im after. please help!

Hi ryanface,

to Laptop GPS World.

I haven't yet experimented with using online maps for navigating. But there are people who have, and I hope they will reply.

At the moment it (for me at least) is more convenient to just buy one of the available laptop GPS programs, install it, and use it. However, if a user lives in an area for which there is no such product, then yes, solutions like online maps, or Ozi Explorer, become very interesting.

Having spent weeks downloading and installing maps for europe and in particular Croatia, I can report that none of what I can find on the net are sufficiently detailed enough (for Croatia) to be very useful. None of the ones that I tried supported routing. So my conclusions are that most likely Marvin is right when he recommends you should buy one of the available programs that comes with maps.

On the other hand, if you dont want auto routing and are happy to use say nroute (which so far in my experience does most of what I want) then being able to use on-line maps would solve the serious lack of detail available for some countries in Open Source Maps (and others). I have trialled the utilities from (http://www.allallsoft.com/gmd/) and found them to be pretty good. I can get the detail I want, say for Croatia, from Google maps. These maps are fine for an electronic version of a paper map, however, I cant load them into nroute for simple trip planning and "where am I now" navigation.

I will continue to work on the issue and like Ryanface, I would like to hear from anyone else with any experience in this area

Im no programmer, but from some of the other things I have seen on the internet it seems like no big deal for someone to create a program that can simply upload saved maps, manually assign latitude and longitude co-ordinates to the top left and bottom right of the map, and then gather the co-ordinate information from your gps and put it onto that program. I have an entire state (victoria, australia) saved as google maps down to a very nice zoom level, and all in offline mode. why cant i get a program just to wack my gps onto it