Faster Map Update

For everything Garmin Zumo 450/550 related
MSTOCK27370
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United States of America

Faster Map Update

Post by MSTOCK27370 »

I'm not sure where to post this, but since this REALLY affected my 450 and 550 I will post it here.

Faster is an understatement! I use SD cards in my 450 and 550. I've seen suggestions about putting the SD card into a card slot on your PC instead of leaving it in the Zumo. I never tried; never thought it would make much difference and wasn't worth the trouble. I was wrong.

CNNA NT 2022.20 was just released, so I decided to update my Zumos. I tried to update with my traditional method, loading the map to my PC first and then using Mapinstall to load the maps to the SD card in the Zumo. The map transfer was going to take 4 hours. I fell asleep during the transfer, and so did my PC, so the transfer was interrupted and didn't complete. I tried another transfer of just my local area, that took 30 minutes, but it was successful.

Then I decided to try making my SD look like my Zumo and put it into the card slot. All that's required is copying one file; GarminDevice.xml into a Garmin folder on the SD card. That will make Express, and MapSource think the SD card is your Zumo. Instead of Mapinstall, I decided to try using MapSource to transfer the maps. I selected the entire continental US along with a few Canadian provinces, 155 map sets, over 3 GB of data. Mapsource saw the SD card as my Zumo 550 and let me transfer the maps to the card. The process took about 20 minutes, building indexes, traffic files and transferring the maps. I haven't tried this with MapInstall so I can't say that the same improvement will occur.

20 minutes versus 4 hours!
Michael S.
Trinity, North Carolina
Zumo 590LM, 396LM, 550 BMW R1100RT, R100, R60/6
sussamb
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Great Britain

Re: Faster Map Update

Post by sussamb »

That's fine for older devices but those with newer devices shouldn't try that, although you can create a clone and update the clone using Express. Express installs far more than just the map, it also updates the junction view and other files that MapSource etc doesn't. Full instructions for newer devices are here

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/39231
MSTOCK27370
Posts: 204
Joined: 05 May 2020 13:02
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United States of America

Re: Faster Map Update

Post by MSTOCK27370 »

No question about that. I would caution others that my 450 doesn’t have enough internal memory to accept the new map update and so I don’t know if this is appropriate for the 450. However the results for the 550 are accurate.

Clearly the older devices are challenged by the size of the new maps and features they are unable to use.
Michael S.
Trinity, North Carolina
Zumo 590LM, 396LM, 550 BMW R1100RT, R100, R60/6
MSTOCK27370
Posts: 204
Joined: 05 May 2020 13:02
Has liked: 13 times
Been liked: 33 times
United States of America

Re: Faster Map Update

Post by MSTOCK27370 »

I was able to do this successfully with my Zumo 450 also. I'm not recommending this for newer devices, but for the 450 and 550, this really beats hours of watching maps transfer.
Michael S.
Trinity, North Carolina
Zumo 590LM, 396LM, 550 BMW R1100RT, R100, R60/6