We've got a lot of complaints about MapSource, and for most problems, Garmin is unlikely to ever resolve them.
Leave it to 31die to provide an excellent solution to one of the most vexing -- the inability to use the MapSource data locally on the harddrive. Now you won't have to suffer Mapsources slow, tedious CD-Rom data accesses. Nothing is quick or efficient inside of MapSource, so these optimizations are worth their weight in gold.
Here are 31die's instructions.
> Run regedit and navigate to
>
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Garmin\MapSource\Products
>
> Under that I have 4 entries, labeled 6 through 9. These correspond to
> Alaska, Hawaii, West and East US. Each one of them contains 3 keys.
> Bmap and Tdb will already be on your machine, Loc will point at a
> subdir of your CD-ROM. Just copy that subdir wherever and change the
> Loc key to point at it.
>
> For example, I copied E:\West to D:\data\mapsource\West and changed
> the key in the exact same fashion.
>
> It doesn't even look for the CD -- it must be authenticated by
> whatever serial number we typed in initially.
>
p.s. remember that if you want to pass around this article to others, forward the 'permanent link' below, not the generic black-coffee blog url.