My Brother"s New 50LM & 2014.10

The nuvi 50LM will install a map update to the nuvi internal storage if there's enough room. If there's insufficient room for the full map the 50LM is entitled to receive, the update process will offer a full map update to a SD card--or offer the owner a smaller geographic area if a SD card is not desired:

https://support.garmin.com/support/searchSupport/case.faces?...

Note, too, that there are two different versions of the 50LM. One comes with the Lower 48 states and the other has the USA and Canada. The map update will only update the 50LM in the areas covered when the nuvi was purchased.

Time will tell. It's good to know the 50LM is friendly about the SD or smaller geographic area. It will be interesting to see how it goes. He's lives outta state from me.

MicroSD cards are cheap. I bought a SanDisk 4GB card for my 50LM off of eBay for around $5 incl shipping, so if space is a concern it's an easy problem to fix. Ebay is great for this, just stick with a reputable manufacturer like SanDisk or Kingston. Higher classes will transfer data faster. I'd recommend a 4GB class 4.

When I did the last update back in February it was the first one to offer to install to my SD card, so I think any other 50LM (like mine) may have a space issue as well. My 50LM is a lower 48 states version.

Actually since that install it may be my imagination but it seems like my Garmin runs & recalculates faster now than it did before.

All this is second hand information thru the e-mail today. The brother tried a DL using GE at bedtime last night, and it said his map was up to date. When he checked the version in the settings it was still 2013.40. He mentioned that it suggested his memory was running low, yet never did offer a down scaled map, even though a SD install was mentioned.

So why did it report that his map was up to date? It wasn't.

One can only guess, but my first thought is that we have another problem due to using Garmin Express. My suggestion is to try again, this time using GarminMapUpdater (copy and paste the link to your browser):

https://support.garmin.com/support/searchSupport/case.faces?caseId={60f574f0-602d-11e2-f3fb-000000000000}

And before trying again, I'd really urge him to go out and buy a 4 or 8GB SD card and install it to the 50LM before starting so as to get the full Lower 48 states.

I updated my 50 LM a few days ago. I tried with GE and I think it would have worked had I not run out of hard drive space on the old laptop. I also noticed task manager had both computers I tried GE on showing 100% CPU usage.
I then tried it with map updater and everything went smoothly and CPU use was much lower.
It all fit on the built in memory although there isn't much left. Nothing is on my SD card.

My brother got the SD card today and his update flew through in half an hour. GE was no problem. Thanks everyone for the assistance. martin