Taxi Driver Online

Send them all to me I'll gladly dispose of them for you.

Can someone please post a linto a thread where ppl discuss issues with Mercury, as our guv seems to not be aware that it's bigger problem. Mercury keep telling him it's just our case.

I think I may be able help with an answer to your original question.

Devices like the XDA were the best you could get several years ago and were therefor a good choice. Back then, data usage was incredibly expensive so software at the time attempted to minimise its use and this process had the added advantage of prolonging battery life. There’s always a compromise between how active the device is and how long the battery lasts and that’s still true with modern devices.

Imagine you had an old word processing program running on Windows 95 PC and what would happen if you tried to upgrade it to run a modern package on a newer operating system? The processor was never designed for this sort of thing and its power consumption would go through the roof with what it’s now being asked to do. In contrast, modern processors and GPS engines are not only faster, they’re infinitely more efficient and so are able to do a lot more while using less power.

If we run our application at a Mercury site, the first reaction is that it’s a whole load faster but an hour down the line there’s a queue of drivers all with flat batteries. So in fairness to Mercury, it’s your old devices that are just not up to the job and the answer isn’t to fit new batteries, the device itself needs to be replaced. The proof of the pudding is that last week we carried out trials on one of the newest devices available and even with the high demands from our app, it ran for an incredible eight hours!

Hope that gives you some hope.

Bill

They tell everyone the same thing romik, it's problems in your office blah blah blah. Of course it couldn't be the shit software and shit connections. A firm over the border are having the same issues as us with Mercury, sign up with them for 3 years and they'll promise you the earth, don't sign up with them and they'll drop you like a stone.

Tell your Guv to rip it out.

Weve had mercury in for 2 years now and yes we went through a phase of looking elswhere but that was down to finacial reasons only as they were putting there prices up. The systen has worked well for us and does what we need it to do (the printing of monthly acounts is now sorted) but remember we only have 12 cars not like nidges firm so couldnt say what its like with 30 plus cars. weve used the support about 6 times in 2 years and theyve always been good and sorted the problem out which was always something we were doing wrong and not the system. What i can say and this is from numerous phone calls to different dispatch providers is that they are one of the few firms that are intrested in helping you if you have under 20 cars. we have no problem with the pda,s other than when drivers drop them and to be honest the last 2 mercury repaired free of charge and yes weve had the drivers appear to be in the middle of the north sea but time has shown us that this is due to drivers running with the pda,s on battery for hours at a time so a simple reset of the pda and then the charger plugged in seems to solve that issue. so without incuring the wrath of nidge i have to say that its a decent system for us and does work well. Just a couple of quick points though if your doing anything with mercury do it through tony dixon as 2 years has shown us he does what he promises and will fight your corner when you start argueing with the finance side of mercury and argue with them you will. So in a nutshell the system works well for us and if they dont put there prices up well stop with them

Well, our devices are new Gsmart ones, that are currently marketed by Mercury. They tell us that drivers keep losing plots due to battery going down by as little as 10% starts to cause this. These things are mobile telephones as far as I understand it, now mobile phones don't stop working correctly until battery discharges completely. In this case 10% discharge and drivers have to start calling control to adjust them on a plot. Again, those are not old XDAs, we just got them, together with this rather useless satnav, works Ok but you can't see anything as lettering is so small. BTW our old XDAs had no plotting issues, new ones do.

Ah I see. I thought when you said upgrade that you meant that you’d upgraded the just the software on the original PDA’s so in which case cancel everything I said.

I’ve never come across these particular devices but I’m very surprised you’re getting so little battery life. I’ve heard complaints about this on some devices and that’s why I’ve been testing to make sure that our devices don’t suffer the same issues. The worst I’ve come across so far is four hours, which isn’t too bad.

GPS doesn’t turn off when you’ve used 10% but they are often designed to turn off when there’s only 10% remaining, even so you should still be getting more time from the device. I’m wondering if you’re over using the navigation function because that will certainly increase the power consumption. Try using it only when you really need to and see if it helps.

You might also want to consider using an in car charger to stop it running down too quickly but if your using that much power, you’ll probably find that your using more that even that will put in. (a bit like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it!)

Bill

Should it not be in a cradle (charging or otherwise) anyway in a moving vehicle ?

Sure. But what system starts playing up after battery is 10% down ie 90% charge? What battery runs dry after 60 minutes? IMHO crap ones, in both cases.

We run on the gsmart pda,s and get around 4 hours without charge after that we start to jump from zones and lose the gps. but thats just with the mercury program running. if you use the sat nave then dont turn it of you then have 2 programs running and both using gps so that could be part of your problem. also go into setting and tell the pda to turn the background lights of or youl end up with 2 gps running and a backlight on all the time. if your having trouble seeing the sat nav go to wilkinson or simlar shop and get a credit card reader (square magnifying glass) and place it over the screen and it works a treat.

Or by some glasses

Magnifiers are ok but its a bugger of a job trying to use the touch screen through one.

I think most of my customers tend to use the voice guidance rather than try to read road names but then again that would probably increase to power consumption as well.
You can't win. You roll a six and end up going down a bloody snake!

Bill

So we speak about the same PDAs, here are the ones that we use http://mercurytaxisoftware.co.uk/pdas-technology/in-car-technology

How can you go into settings on this one? Battery life on this unit is just over 1 hour. Yes whilst the car is being driven it is charging, but whilst you wait for a job it drops 10% within 10+ minutes and ppl start being thrown all over the plot.

I've got the new Gsmart PDA with the Mercury holder and I can concour what romik says, they dump their battery life in well under what Exel say. One thing I did try was turning off that god awful Sat Nav that is included with the panther PDA that extened the battery life but not by an awful lot.

Ah youve got the new panther pda,s. Sorry but we have the model before that
http://www.exelmanagement.com/Site/Merc ... /index.htm Oh the joy of miss comunication.

Tony Dixon. Yes, well, sounds a very helpful chap but when your system goes down on a busy weekend night and takes 2 hours to reboot, he's not much use. Why they hack the Windows so you can't just boot up quickly I will never know.
I asked for many features already in other software, but got none of them.
Their PDA programmer lives in New Zealand but they can't contact him, he contacts them when he fancies working. I got that from one of the telephonists when I rang up to complain that the PDA was blinding at night. Who would pick a white background? But then again, a firm just 2 miles up the road had a black background, the very same I'd asked for but it wasn't available.
Too many different answers from different people.
And GOD help you if you ever want to redo your plots! I had to drive to HQ (180 mile round trip) and after 2 weeks they sent the new mapping but couldn't transfer simple stuff like drivers, vehicles, accounts and the hundreds of new places or corrections in the address database. Good job I managed to botch up my pc to run their 'server' and copy stuff one piece at a time.
Mercury, you owe me months of my life.
So, just don't talk to Tony but talk to the others and then laugh at the different versions you get.

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Datamaster don't need a sales team, they have happy customers doing it for them
Nidge for Prime Minister