New USB Drivers from garmin

I had to re-read the info at that link a few times before I realized it is for mobile devices.

I'm sitting here with my nuvi thinking, "wait a minute, I've not needed special USB drivers before to talk to my nuvi, what's this all about?"

Now I got it.

I just received a new GPS that arrived in the mail today and when I tried to register the unit on the Garmin website, I had to download a whole new set of Communicator and other plugin updates.

I hope these extra updates will do exactly what it says on the tin ...

Currently downloading a free map update - only four hours left!

Speaking of which, why does it take so long to update the maps?

Usb drivers are used for mobile devices connected to your pc via usb, in order to do updates, using webupdater, poiloader etc.

I just updated the maps on my 885t recently and it took less than an hour to download the map update file and less than 15 minutes for the actual GPS unit and PC map update once the download was complete.

1. The time to download a 2GB file to your PC will mostly depend on the speed of your internet connection.

2. The time to load the maps from your PC to your device will mostly depend on the type of USB connection to your particular GPS model - USB 1.1 or USB 2.0). My older nuvi 660 has the slower USB 1.1 interface and takes a long time to load maps from the PC. Plus, about 7 minutes are needed just to unpack the compressed RAR file.

I wish my Zumo550 would have USB 2.0. The 1.1 connection is extremely slow when loading new maps. Why they did that, I have no idea. At the time the Zumo was released USB 2.0 was already available.

I've seen reports of a user with a new 1690T stating USB transfer speeds (PC to nuvi drive) to seemingly be comparable to USB 1.1 speeds...maybe a faulty unit but if not and some of these new 1xxx series units are still being produced with USB 1.1 speed interfaces, that is simply ridiculous.