someone recently informed me that garmin was giving out free map updates for automotive GPS units. according to the garmin website my GPS unit was indeed eligible for a free map update. this was very good news to me because i bought my GPS in 2006 and it’s still fully functional, but the map data is grossly out of date. i have never wanted to spend the previous $50 fee to update the maps.

i’d like to note that i do use google maps on my android phone and like it quite a bit. however, sometimes i need to drive in areas outside of cellular range and thus lose the turn-by-turn navigation. i’m aware that there’s an offline mode to combat this problem, but i have yet to try it.

anyways, so i began with a garmin firmware update for my device. the initial update run actually blue screened windows 7 which i found surprising. i was more than a little scared that i just bricked the GPS at this point. luckily, a 2nd application of the update went through fine with no crashes.

the next step is to download maps and apply them to the device. here’s where i learned that the maps are gigantic in size. the majority of the east coast of the US = 1GB of space. i’m unaware of what the built-in storage of my GPS unit is, but i’m fairly sure my first map data transfer was a failure. then i lucked out and discovered there’s a microSD slot on the unit. i happened to have a 1GB microSD laying around. with the microSD card inserted the transfer succeeded the 2nd time.
the entire map downloading/transferal process took roughly 3 hours.

so it’s pretty cool that i was able to inject some new life into a 5 year old device.