A Truly Great Gadget
Pro: many many American locations and international cities weather is frequently updated very good-looking display worked much better than other similar products
Con: Installation Software didn't come up automatically (but very easily remedied; rest of installation was very easy and the software worked great after that)
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The Weather Fxi comes in shrink wrap packaging. You cut it out of the box. There's a receiver with the screen that you see in Amazon's listing a transmitter that plugs into a USB port on your computer and a CD. There are instructions but you barely need to read them.
You put the CD in your computer's drive. This was the only weakness of the whole package -- my CD drive did not automatically load the program. I had to go to explorer and click on the startup program manually. It was very obvious and it took me under 15 seconds but some people might be a bit stalled by this. If you were expecting the program to just pop up on the screen (or if you didn't know how to start a program by using Window's explorer --that would be right click on the start button and then scroll till you find your CD drive and then double click on the startup program that you'll find on that drive) then I suppose you might not be able to get this to work. I do not consider this the least bit difficult; it takes 15 seconds tops and most everyone I know is familiar with finding programs on their disk drive and double clicking on them.
Anyway you then plug in the transmitter to a USB port on the computer. Finally you pick five locales to monitor. There are a LOT of cities -- my Boston suburb is on there with a population of 30000 as was my mother's suburb of NYC also about the same size. My mother in law and daughter who live in their respective cities were also there; there wasn't a way (that I saw anyway) to further define their location but I think that should be suficient anyway. Finally for my son I selected Munich Germany. The selection process takes about 3 or 4 minutes. You have to wait for 30 seconds or so after each selection for the software to think before you can move on to the next city.
That's it. We've had it for several days now and it constantly updates all by itself. The display screen is really good looking and detailed. There are at least 15 or 20 different symbols for the weather (clouds rain snow sun partial sun etc.) a written statement (like "becoming cloudy and cold" the temperature high and low wind precipitation humidity what temperature it "really" feels like as well as the predictions or the next several days. You can press a button on one side and instead of three days forecasts it will give you morning noon and night for today or days four through six. You press a button on the other side and it scrolls through complete data for the other 4 cities. If you plug it in it stays back-lit (it runs on batteries too but we haven't tried that). It's extrememly easy to read. One last thing -- the screen changes colors depending on what band of 10 degrees the temperature is -- my wife loves that.
So the bottom line is that it took less than 10 minutes to set up it takes no maintenance whatsoever it displays international locations (very few do) and it is very sharp looking.
VERY highly recommended.
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