Combined POI Files vs Dedicated POI Files

The rest Area Combined file, in most cases, is far more accurate and up to date than most of of the individual state files. The combined file is typically updated monthly where some of the individual files have not been updated in several years.
Read the write up that comes with the file.
I'm sure most of the users will agree with me.

Welcome to The Factory, Rick.

Yes, MrKen is correct for several reasons.

You can get the maximum benefit from the Rest Areas Combined file when installing it to your 350 with POI Loader by installing in Manual Mode and setting an Alert Distance of, say, about 3 miles or so. You won't get alerts if using the default Express mode.

Check the faqs as well and see if you want to add a rest area custom icon and audio alert. Your 350 can use either mp3 audio files (or wav files if sox.exe is installed as well).

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/4458

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/4137

In most of the cases I would use the combined poi file rather than the deducated as there is a better chance that it is keep up todate more often.

The limit is extremely high but cannot be exactly determined. It depends on the size of future map updates and features like Junction View which change in size with updates.

Each POI is a text string of usually one line. Members have reported many tens of thousands of POIs on their nuvis. Combined Rest Areas is so unbelievably small compared to the possible limit that there is nothing to worry about.

If at some future time you need more space unused files such as speech files or help files in other languages can be deleted in the nuvi after a backup.

dobs108

Thanks for the info

The Nuvi 350 does have Junction View support so those files will not be installed with map updates. PIOs are just a few bytes of text, so as long as you don't go crazy with pictures, mp3 on the Nuvi350 you pretty much have more PIO space than there are PIO. I have many thousands on my Nuvi 350.

Someone correct me if this is wrong, but I have found that you can have 32 separate folders, each containing 32 different files. You can also put 32 POI files into the root directory, so that should be 1,056 separate POI files. Each file can have thousands of individual points of interest. I haven't got a clue as to how many individual POI locations can be in a given file, but you can clearly have millions of individual POI locations loaded, in total. I think most of us put them on an SD card, as the internal memory of the unit is limited.

In another thread - http://www.poi-factory.com/node/29983 - some testing was done which showed that the number of subfolders was not limited to 32 (but we don't know if there is some higher limit)

However, this same testing indicated that the number of POI files in a sub-folder was limited to 32.

edit01: I just tested the 32 file limit because I could not find anything in POILoader Help indicating a limit. Thus, I hoped it had been removed. However, when I tried a POILOader run pointing to a directory with 39 folders - one of which had 42 files, POILoader gave me this error message:

Only 32 custom POI files are allowed in a subfolder.
The older “C\Garmin\Foldersthirtynine/filesfortytwo” exceeds that limit.
Please reorganize your custom POI files and run POILoader again.

edit02: Interestingly, after I reduced the "filesfortytwo" folder to 32 files and did the run, all the folder/files in this latested run sorted ABOVE my normal POI files in the "Custom POIs" screen. So I did another POILOader run to see if those folder/files would sort at the top as the previous POILoader run had done. NO - those seemed to sort correctly (but note that I had named them "Xfolder" "Yfolder" and "Zfolder" expecting to see them at the top of the list but finding them at the bottom of the list)

Somebody - please see what happens to "Categories" when you do multiple POILoader runs (now that we can specify the output .gpi name in POILoader)