Garmin, really

georgelesley wrote:
Tried to update both our gps units, one is 6-7 yrs old the other 2 yrs old, today for our Alaska trip starting Friday. Wound up talking to a csr who said she would turn me over to someone who could walk me thru it step by step.

A few minutes later a different person calls me back. He really did a good job of trying. He took over my computer, a pc win 8 vintage that we very rarely turn on. He got thru the loading maps, preparing maps, but could not get the install part to complete.

He told me it was a driver issue because we had not kept our old pc up to date. But he had a solution. For the mere sum of $249 for three years or $549 lifetime he could fix it and protect all our other stuff from bugs, malware, and bad stuff.

I politely declined his generous offer and told him we had many other ways to navigate these days and for that money I could buy a cheap pc or another gps. We can navigate many other ways these days and it looks like garmin will not be a part of it. Hopefully the traffic part may still work.

Back to our truckers atlas and Waze.

Call Garmin back and tell them this happened. They really do have good customer service, it's likely you got connected to a bad apple at the help desk who tried to scam you.

Your older navigator likely needs a memory upgrade to handle the new maps. Go to any store that sells digital cameras or cell phones, and buy an 8GB microSD card. There's a slot on the side of your Garmin this card will slide into. Once in place, you're set for many more years of updates.

Hard to say what the problem is when your newer model. Post the model # here, someone may have more information.

Or don't worry about it. There's no new roads leading into Alaska, even outdated maps are good enough.