Hard reset (now GPS has me in Illinois)

Can you go to your satellite page and see how many satellites your GPS sees and their signal strength?

When you say you're in NY, do you mean NYC surrounded by skyscrapers?

After a reset, you should fire up the nuvi in an open sky area and give it many minutes to find the satellites and know where it is. This takes longer than usual when the nuvi is first fired up, after a hard reset and after being powered up in a location far from when it was last turned on.

The hope is that after 10-15 minutes of being turned on and not moving that it'll know where it is. If you're in a canyon (or a city canyon surrounded by skyscrapers) limiting your view of the sky and satellites, this task will be hard for the GPS to do.

Good luck.

You say you did a hard reset which I thought restored the unit to factory defaults. But - you also say that your "home" was left in the unit.

You have to wait for the unit to lock into sats again before it will show your current actual location.

Which is warmer? Being in IL right now may not be a bad thing. But I understand. Short of a total reboot, it is frustrating. My Nuvi thinks I need to be 2 feet to the left, while I'm sitting in my own garage.

Agreed. It must be left stationary to reload the ephimeris data from the GPS satellites (if all the data was lost).

One thing to note is that even when you do have your position correct, when the unit is started from a cold boot, it's not a good idea to move (as in the car) until you get a proper GPS fix. Moving while trying to get a fix will cause the unit to take a long to to locate itself.

Newer units with the high sensitivity GPS receivers won't have too much of an issue with this but older units can.

I backed up my favorites and transferred the backed up file to the gps.

Did somehow it go into simulation mode?