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Garmin Nuvi - True Paperless Geocaching


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This thread is to be used for all help/support/bug fixes for the tutorial at the website above.

 

So, for all help/queries/support/requests, please post away here.

 

All I ask is a few simple requests

 

* Be polite.

* Don't demand anything, I do this in my spare time and will help when I can.

* If you discover something good or find a better way to do things, please share it with us!

 

Enjoy the hunt.

 

Thank you very much for the useful information. I didn't realize my Nuvi would do all that. :unsure:

I was amazed when I read your tutorial.

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This thread is to be used for all help/support/bug fixes for the tutorial at the website above.

 

So, for all help/queries/support/requests, please post away here.

 

All I ask is a few simple requests

 

* Be polite.

* Don't demand anything, I do this in my spare time and will help when I can.

* If you discover something good or find a better way to do things, please share it with us!

 

Enjoy the hunt.

Link to comment

 

This thread is to be used for all help/support/bug fixes for the tutorial at the website above.

 

So, for all help/queries/support/requests, please post away here.

 

All I ask is a few simple requests

 

* Be polite.

* Don't demand anything, I do this in my spare time and will help when I can.

* If you discover something good or find a better way to do things, please share it with us!

 

Enjoy the hunt.

 

Hi again

 

Can this process be used if going to a different location / country etc, how much memory is there avilible within the Nuvi, can topo and extra PQ of lets say a different ared be stored on a SD card?

 

thats it for the minute

 

kind regards

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QUOTE (ginger4x4): how much memory is there avilible within the Nuvi, can topo and extra PQ of lets say a different ared be stored on a SD card?

 

 

It depends on how big your SD card is; I have a 2GB card and I have it loaded with over 20,000 caches and TOPO maps of all of Canada south of 55* Latitude. It works fine for me. The finished macro files take up about 25MB per 10 000 caches in your database.

 

I hope this helps,

 

Kyle

Edited by ky.m.guy
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Many, many thanks for this invaluable macro and a well written tutorial.

 

I could not retrieve POILoader 2.5.2 from your link, but found it on the Garmin site by looking at the URL of the latest (2.5.3) version.

 

http://www.garmin.com/software/POILoaderforWindows_252.exe

 

Worked like a charm on my 660 with latest firmware. Proximity alarm works as well, and is guaranteed to irritate any spouse not into geocaching :o

 

A couple of observations : loading a new POI appears to overwrite the older POI file, and I have yet to figure out how to store POI in memory card vs. internal memory. It would be nice to be able to categorize the custom POIs as well. None of these are important - the ability already present is just.. wow. If I had found this earlier I may not have bought a handheld GPSr.

 

Oh, one other thing : apparently the latest GSAK installs into c:\gsak on XP. I tried this on two machines (both running XP Professional)

Edited by Chrysalides
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A couple of observations : loading a new POI appears to overwrite the older POI file, and I have yet to figure out how to store POI in memory card vs. internal memory. It would be nice to be able to categorize the custom POIs as well. None of these are important - the ability already present is just.. wow. If I had found this earlier I may not have bought a handheld GPSr.

 

read the posts in this thread, and you'll find the answers to all your questions and observations here

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The tutorial is truly excellent and the macro is just what I've been looking for. I do have one question though. I have a nuvi 880 and there is no selection available in the macro for the 800 series nuvis. Before I try (and get myself into trouble), I just thought it would be wise to ask if any of the other selections might work with the 800s?

Thanks!!

Edited by H2"O"
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The tutorial is truly excellent and the macro is just what I've been looking for. I do have one question though. I have a nuvi 880 and there is no selection available in the macro for the 800 series nuvis. Before I try (and get myself into trouble), I just thought it would be wise to ask if any of the other selections might work with the 800s?

Thanks!!

 

You can't "Break" your Nuvi with any of them. They're all just POI Files, but formatted differently for the different screen sizes, etc. I would recommend trying the 7xx series one first, but if it doesn't work, experimenting with all of them isn't going to hurt anything.

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Here's something odd that I just found. In the cache descriptions I just viewed, some sentences end with andnbsp...or, andnbsp;andnbsp...?? At first I thought that they might be ampersands or something (like sometimes quotation marks come up as quot quot etc), but there is nothing like that on the actual cache page. It's not a problem, but it is strange

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This is fantastic!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

 

I got the free Nuvi 200 a couple months ago, and just last week used it to help find a cache when I didn't have my handheld with me. I had loaded a .gpx file into it and they were all loaded into the favorites. Fine, except there's no way of getting rid of them in the 200 except deleting one at a time, or a hard reset. Bah.

 

Then, yesterday I stumbled across a thread in the MiGO forums about this and was intrigued. I read the tutorial (and also started reading this thread), thought 'how easy is this?', and last night downloaded what I needed and had it all installed on the Nuvi in minutes. It works GREAT!!! I did the hard reset (I only had 2 actual 'favorites' to put back in afterward), and now use the POI Loader to put gpx files on it and/or delete them in bulk. AND, now I have the complete cache listing in there too. Awesome!

 

I finished reading this thread today and found answers to all the questions I had about it. Thank you everyone for all the helpful info. And thank you again, pilotsnipes for all the work and countless hours you've put into making paperless caching with the Nuvi so easy for all of us!

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This thread is to be used for all help/support/bug fixes for the tutorial at the website above.

 

So, for all help/queries/support/requests, please post away here.

 

All I ask is a few simple requests

 

* Be polite.

* Don't demand anything, I do this in my spare time and will help when I can.

* If you discover something good or find a better way to do things, please share it with us!

 

Enjoy the hunt.

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We went out yesterday to give this a workout. It was all looking good until the proximity alert chimed a couple of times. I guess the 800 have the same problem as the 700s...everything came to a screeching halt. We'll have to look for a Garmin update too.

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Well here I go. I have never written to ask a question on this forum. I have skimmed thru the 13 pages and my mind is mind boggled. I was excited that I can download caches to my Garmin Nuvi 680. I am not savy like all these people on the last 13 pages. First I don't know what "xxx" I have. I installed the well written instructions to the best of my kindergarten mentality. I got to the screen that says "Please select the directory where the data can be found. At this point I am just using the default on the screen. Then I get an error msg. that says, Windows cannot find.....

c:\programfiles\garmin\sox.exe.......so I clicked ok. Now I get a second error msg. that says Poiloader unable to convert.........c:\gsak\poiloader/geocache tour guide.wav to proper format, therefore this audio file will not be transfered to your gps. I clicked ok. Then it says my downloads were successful. The story gets better. I look at my custom POI's and they are ones I don't even have in GSAK anymore. There are only like 6 or so caches listed not like 200 I ask for from my database in GSAK. Geeze I am just blown away by all this. I hope you can help me.

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Pilotsnipes,

 

CLipped this from your tutorial (about accessing the Nuvi page that shows exact coords and sats).

 

"Nuvi 2xx Owners - some 2xx owners have had difficulty in getting this screen to appear at all. We do not know all the facts yet, ie. which model/firmware is causing this. Please check the support forum for more info."

 

I have a Nuvi 200 and nothing happens when I touch the green sig-strength bars in the upper left corner. In the above sentence you refer the readers to the the "support forum for more info."

 

Is this the support forum you're referring to or is it elsewhere? It's no big deal but I would like to access the current coords function if you or someone here has figured out how to do it on a Nuvi 200. Thanks.

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I have a Nuvi 200 and nothing happens when I touch the green sig-strength bars in the upper left corner. In the above sentence you refer the readers to the the "support forum for more info."

 

I'm just going to add my experience here... I've got a Nüvi 205 and I can access the screen by holding my finger on the green bars for a couple of seconds. However I've showed a friend how to use his Nüvi 200 for geocaching and tried the same method and it refused to show the screen. Both units where having the latest firmware available at the time (this was 4 weeks ago). I have since then upgraded my 205 unit to firmware 4.40 (was 3.10 before) and can still access the screen.

 

My guess is that you can access this screen on the 2x5 versions but not on the 2x0 versions but I don't mind being proved wrong.

Edited by kallt_kaffe
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I played around a bit with my Nuvi 680. I changed it to 2xx from 6xx. I no longer get the error messages I described. Guess that was one of my problems. I can hold down on the green bars and the map of a selected cache comes up and I took it for a spin and it took me right to the cache.

 

Now I have one more BIG problem and if I can get it ironed out I am good to go, I think. I go to GSAK and the Database I WANT to down load and it downloads all the old caches I have found. I don't even have a page on GSAK right now of my past finds. So how do I get it to download the page of caches I want and also it only downloads about 12 and it tells me it has downloaded 200. I am so close. Hope someone can help me. I loved my sample spin with Nuvi yesterday.

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OK, now I have a new problem. After creating custom POIs with the proximity alert and discovering that the 800 series have the same crashing issue as the 700 series, I can't get rid of the POIs except by removing the SD card and doing a reset. I've tried deleting through the POI loader with no luck. Then I tried creating a new set of POIs, but they just install alongside the originals without deleting any. I even tried using the micro to SD adapter and erasing on my PC, but for some reason, the PC doesn't see the micro card. My next step will be a dedicated micro reader and if that fails, a new micro card.

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Pilotsnipes -   is a Non Breaking Space code for HTML. I would suggest before you remove the "&" symbol, that you add a snippet of code that replaces " " with " "

 

Heres a weird problem i've been experincing. Every time, the first time I create the POI file, POI loader thinks it is invalid. I create the file a second time, and it's fine.

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My ineptitude has reached its highest level, I have apparently broken the macro! First I ran it in manual mode, with proximity alerts on my nuvi 880. Everything looked great while sitting at home with the "more" info running all the way through the cache page . I took it out for a spin and soon after the alert sounded, the unit froze. I assumed that the 880 had a similar bug as the 700 series and re-ran the macro without the alerts. The only change I made was to change the "Will you be using the alert feature in POILoader?" to No. After running the macro, I tried to load the results to the nuvi and got the message "custom POIs/geocache tourguide.gpx is invalid etc". I tried uninstalling the macro, re-downloading it and re-installing. I did the same with POI Loader. The settings in the macro were still where I had them so obviously, I didn't really uninstall completely. :D

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dougsmiley, I ran the macro several times and I keep getting the "invalid"

 

Until someone more knowledgeable than me gets back to you, there's a couple of things you can try:

 

1. Delete the custom POI using POI Loader before uploading

 

2. Enable proximity alert and see if POI Loader likes the file better.

 

Can you also check the version of POI Loader you're using?

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Pilotsnipes,

 

CLipped this from your tutorial (about accessing the Nuvi page that shows exact coords and sats).

 

"Nuvi 2xx Owners - some 2xx owners have had difficulty in getting this screen to appear at all. We do not know all the facts yet, ie. which model/firmware is causing this. Please check the support forum for more info."

 

I have a Nuvi 200 and nothing happens when I touch the green sig-strength bars in the upper left corner. In the above sentence you refer the readers to the the "support forum for more info."

 

Is this the support forum you're referring to or is it elsewhere? It's no big deal but I would like to access the current coords function if you or someone here has figured out how to do it on a Nuvi 200. Thanks.

 

If you have a Nuvi 200W you can access the screen.

If you have the plain Nuvi 200 that screen is not available.

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Pilotsnipes,

 

CLipped this from your tutorial (about accessing the Nuvi page that shows exact coords and sats).

 

"Nuvi 2xx Owners - some 2xx owners have had difficulty in getting this screen to appear at all. We do not know all the facts yet, ie. which model/firmware is causing this. Please check the support forum for more info."

 

I have a Nuvi 200 and nothing happens when I touch the green sig-strength bars in the upper left corner. In the above sentence you refer the readers to the the "support forum for more info."

 

Is this the support forum you're referring to or is it elsewhere? It's no big deal but I would like to access the current coords function if you or someone here has figured out how to do it on a Nuvi 200. Thanks.

 

If you have a Nuvi 200W you can access the screen.

If you have the plain Nuvi 200 that screen is not available.

 

TillaMurphs,

 

Thank you, kindly.

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Pilotsnipes,

 

CLipped this from your tutorial (about accessing the Nuvi page that shows exact coords and sats).

 

"Nuvi 2xx Owners - some 2xx owners have had difficulty in getting this screen to appear at all. We do not know all the facts yet, ie. which model/firmware is causing this. Please check the support forum for more info."

 

I have a Nuvi 200 and nothing happens when I touch the green sig-strength bars in the upper left corner. In the above sentence you refer the readers to the the "support forum for more info."

 

Is this the support forum you're referring to or is it elsewhere? It's no big deal but I would like to access the current coords function if you or someone here has figured out how to do it on a Nuvi 200. Thanks.

 

If you have a Nuvi 200W you can access the screen.

If you have the plain Nuvi 200 that screen is not available.

 

TillaMurphs,

 

Thank you, kindly.

 

You are very welcome.

With the plain Nuvi 200 you can access a "snapshot" of your coordinates on a different screen. The coordinates do not continuously update (like they do on the satellite screen of widescreen Nuvis) but it is better than nothing.

 

Here is a post that discusses the snapshot option and another option for the non widescreen Nuvis.

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Just sold my Magellan Meridian Color (my 3rd Maggie BTW) and bought a Garmin Nuvi 205W! Installed the Paperless setup and must say THIS FREAKIN ROCKS!!!!! After the Magellans with limited waypoint ID space and the 250/500 cap on comments this must almost be the Holy Grail of caching. Thanks Pilotsnipes, Robert Lipe, Clyde E and anyone else involved in this deal.

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I just received my Nuvi 755 yesterday and sent Garmin an email about the alert feature not working. Got an email back this morning saying I must have gotten a bad TourGuide map as it works fine. Tonight I created a neighborhood three cache file in GSAK to test it and loaded it into my Nuvi with your macro. They are correct, it works fine. I got an alert and then up popped the name of the cache that I was close too. Don't know if all the 7xx Nuvi's will work but the 755 will. So thanks for the great program that I plan to use tomorrow to find a few caches.

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This. Is. Awesome.

 

I am so excited. I have a Garmin 650 and an old Palm that we used to make it paperless, but now all on one device and with more space. I can't tell you how excited I am.

 

Now... if I could just get the 650 to hold a battery charge better...

 

I was contemplating getting a handheld that takes regular batteries and just using the nuvi for the car but now I'm torn.

 

Anyone have any advice on the battery issue? Mine does not seem to last very long and I've already got the screen dimming out after 15 seconds when I'm not looking for something.

 

Thanks!!!

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The batteries for the 6XX series nuvi (or all of them I guess) are really not designed to be used as a handheld. I'm guessing its the power requirements of the screen. My 660 doesn't last too long either. I still prefer to use a handheld (with Hybrid rechargables) for the actual cache search and a Palm for the notetaking. But these macros make the "gettin to" process via an AutoNav so much easier as well as having all the cache details right there (much faster to get the info than to search on the Palm).

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I recently used this software to move POI's into a colorado - love the idea of being able to put all of my database into it. Problem I ran into was that all of the ones I haven't found show up as duplicates - one copy with the name and all the information, and then one with the GC code as the name, and no extra information. It is only for ones which I have not found - it doesn't do it for found ones. It also has nothing to do with child waypoints or additional waypoints, because the first couple I found have neither.

 

When I was looking for more information a few days back, before I set this up, I am sure I found someone who had pretty that much same problem, but can't find that post after an hour of looking, so I'm just going to ask. The only info I could find was something about ones having child waypoints and they weren't entered into the GSAK database correctly, but that doesn't appear to apply since those waypoints don't have children.

 

Help! Thanks for making this great software!

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This is just to say THANK YOU PILOTSNIPES for your priceless work.

 

My girlfriend got a Nuvi 200 and we load the gpi to a SD card as per your method. It works great!!

 

Here are some issues we can report out of memorie:

 

We have the same "problems" other have reported: no coordinates/GPS image when we press & hold the green bars or whatever, but that's ok cause we just use the Nuvi on the car for the approach. Then we use other handheld GPSr.

 

Also, some cache descriptions show some of those "funny" letters, but we can live with that.

 

Sometimes we format the SD card. When loading the geocaches again into it, we get an error message saying there is no folder to put the file in to. So I just create a folder called Garmin on the SD card and do it again.

 

Some other times, I mark to ignore some "custom POIs/geocache tourguide.gpx" file in Poiloader. This results in zero POIs loaded. I just do it again and correct this.

 

we don't use the alert feature as it gets quite annoying sometimes.

 

Greetings from Portugal.

Edited by alieri
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Another happy report on setting up my new nuvi 650 and it is working flawlessly after I stumbled through the instructions :cute: . Thanks for the good work. Maybe my kids won't worry as much now about me watching my gpsr or reading my PDA or looking at the maps program on my laptop while driving. At least the nuvi remains in my line of vision while navigating :)

 

Great job !!!

Edited by PWCinPC
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Somewhat off subject, but there are many Nuvi experts here, so I will ask.

 

Can a tracklog be taken from a Nuvi. I know that it shows distance, speed, etc, until it is reset. I have looked for a log file but could not find. Would like to see track points with location, time stamp. (I have a 260)

Thanks.

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You really have done a nice job the the Nuvi paperless geocaching. I have been using Nuvi 360 with the macro since June and it works great. Only one suggestion (of course)... When I go to view map and manually zoom In/Out or move around (not physically but manually with my finger like trying to read the map and see what is around) you can not see the caches. It would be nice if when this happens you could view all the caches and thier icons on the map. I know there was a way to drop a GPX file in one of the folders on the nuvi drive and they would show up but doing so doubles up the POI count (only have 500) and don't get the nice paperless geocaching either. So it would be a nice feature if we could be viewing the map and seeing where our caches are too. Hope that makes sense...

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We were out today and ran into a problem with my nuvi 880. Originally, I had a problem with the unit freezing while the prox alerts were chiming. I deleted all that and now just use it without the alerts. That was working fine untill today. I was reading cache info (more) and the unit froze again. The only way I could get it back was to remove and replace the battery. I'll write to Garmin, hopefully it's a glitch that they know about (and are working on)

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You really have done a nice job the the Nuvi paperless geocaching. I have been using Nuvi 360 with the macro since June and it works great. Only one suggestion (of course)... When I go to view map and manually zoom In/Out or move around (not physically but manually with my finger like trying to read the map and see what is around) you can not see the caches. It would be nice if when this happens you could view all the caches and thier icons on the map. I know there was a way to drop a GPX file in one of the folders on the nuvi drive and they would show up but doing so doubles up the POI count (only have 500) and don't get the nice paperless geocaching either. So it would be a nice feature if we could be viewing the map and seeing where our caches are too. Hope that makes sense...

The "seeing the caches" function on the nuvi is a function of the "Favorites" category. And, yes, it is limited to 500 waypoints. The Favorites are loaded via a GPX file dropped into the \Garmin\gpx folder on the nuvi. This macro generates a .poi file that is separate. There is effectively no limit to the number of POIs that you may have (I have 5000 in mine). However, the POIs do not show up on the 3D screen like the Favorites do.

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You really have done a nice job the the Nuvi paperless geocaching. I have been using Nuvi 360 with the macro since June and it works great. Only one suggestion (of course)... When I go to view map and manually zoom In/Out or move around (not physically but manually with my finger like trying to read the map and see what is around) you can not see the caches. It would be nice if when this happens you could view all the caches and thier icons on the map. I know there was a way to drop a GPX file in one of the folders on the nuvi drive and they would show up but doing so doubles up the POI count (only have 500) and don't get the nice paperless geocaching either. So it would be a nice feature if we could be viewing the map and seeing where our caches are too. Hope that makes sense...

The "seeing the caches" function on the nuvi is a function of the "Favorites" category. And, yes, it is limited to 500 waypoints. The Favorites are loaded via a GPX file dropped into the \Garmin\gpx folder on the nuvi. This macro generates a .poi file that is separate. There is effectively no limit to the number of POIs that you may have (I have 5000 in mine). However, the POIs do not show up on the 3D screen like the Favorites do.

 

Actually they will show up but you have to zoom in enough for it to show.

On my 255w the zoom has to be max 80m, but different nuvi have different zoom req.

I sent a sugestion to Garmin to have the zoom increased to 120m but I know they will never add it to the 255w. <_<

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Was going to start another thread, but I guess this would be the right thread to ask on.....

 

So far I really like the way this has improved my Nuvi 200. The only thing I don't care for is the bell on the POI alert and I'd like to undo that on my Nuvi. I'm using a SD for cache file storage and the last ones I loaded on it were done through POI Loader without the alert feature.

 

The only problem is that old cache files are still in my Nuvi's internal memory and the DINGER drives me nuts. I'd like to go in and remove all these old cache files and I don't know what is what in there. Do these type files have a certain extension suffix. I'd like to clean house and start fresh, but I don't want to remove something critical. Anyone know how to do this?

 

Or.....is there a way to just turning off the bell without muting the whole device? Thanks.

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The only problem is that old cache files are still in my Nuvi's internal memory and the DINGER drives me nuts. I'd like to go in and remove all these old cache files and I don't know what is what in there. Do these type files have a certain extension suffix. I'd like to clean house and start fresh, but I don't want to remove something critical. Anyone know how to do this?

Can you run POI Loader and tell it to delete old POIs, with the Nuvi plugged in and SD card removed?

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The only problem is that old cache files are still in my Nuvi's internal memory and the DINGER drives me nuts. I'd like to go in and remove all these old cache files and I don't know what is what in there. Do these type files have a certain extension suffix. I'd like to clean house and start fresh, but I don't want to remove something critical. Anyone know how to do this?

Can you run POI Loader and tell it to delete old POIs, with the Nuvi plugged in and SD card removed?

Well >>>> twelve hours trying to get beyond " add Nuvi button " Complete and total refusal to proceed. My screens do not match the tutorial screens. Whine, whine, whine, whine.

Guess you me and Nuvi were not meant to be.

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