Two steps forward, one step back

I have a Garmin Nüvi 1350 that lives in my Lexus and it complained about having outdated maps when I hooked it up on Sunday.

It came with lifetime maps, so I fired up my Garmin Express and told it to update the GPS.

Naturally, these things can never go smoothly. Garmin Express told me the GPS had insufficient memory to handle the new map package for the Continental 49 U.S. States and Canada and asked me to choose a regional map selection.

It also told me I could load the entire U.S./Canada package if I installed a 4GB microSD card.

So I installed an 8GB microSD card and the GPS sees the card and all is well. Except it now only speaks in a male voice, having deleted the female voice I preferred.

Garmin Express lets you add voices, so I can always go back and fix that.

I also bought an 8GB SD card for my Garmin Zumo 550 in hopes that I could achieve the same map capacity.

But Garmin Express apparently can’t achieve a seamless mapping interface between the Zumo and an SD card, at least not without a lot of tweaks that I haven’t yet figured out.

So I loaded the SE U.S. selection for the time being. I fiddled around and, for some reason I can’t recall, tried to re-load the SE U.S. package, which generated an error message.

I also added a bunch of MP3 music files to the new SD card.

So when I headed out for the post office and town this morning, my Zumo kept shutting down about the time it was loading maps and seeking satellites.

Uh-oh.

I hope to remedy the problem by changing the map selection to the SW U.S. and going back to the old 2GB SD card. The installation is in progress right now. If it corrects the problem, I’ll change back to the SE U.S. package, since I’ll need it soon to ride to the BMW RA rally in Birmingham, Ala.

LATER: Yup, that fixed it.