Looking for Advice on New Garmin

Someone posted here recently that refurb 3597s were available at one of the online GPS stores for about $200. That's half of what they sold for new and I don't think you will find (m)any complaints about the unit.

Take advantage of your good fortune and get the Garmin DriveLuxe 50LMTHD. It is one of the few units that has a powered mount which avoids a weak spot where the cable connects directly to other units. The 3597 also has a powered mount.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/45925

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/garmin-driveluxe-50lmthd-5-gps-w...

http://www.gpscity.com/garmin-driveluxe-50lmthd.html

Wu,

My deepest sympathies to you in your time of dispair.

I'm sure at a time like this, words of comfort can not provide you with comfort.

I'm hoping your reciveing meaningful solacement knowing your GPS received its final transport to the rubbish pile, in the back of a garbage collection vehicle.

Like ashes to ashes and dust to dust, by now, your GPS has been reduced to its most basic components and it's on its way to various recyceling sites.

I beleive this says the things I can't properly convey

https://youtu.be/j3qIBHStUc0

So what the heck is

What's so great abut a magnetic mount that it's worht spending $150+ more for it?

So what the heck is

Ah, the good 'ol days. I'll post a few articles about it below. Be forewarned that you may have to blow the layer of dust off of the internet before you can read these articles.

I was never 100% sure how it worked. I know for a fact that it would allow you to use HOV lanes. It also cancelled some of the settings you had in your GPS (since most of us transfer the personally owned unit between our personal car and the fire truck/ambulance/police car). For example, U-Turns and Toll roads would be taken even if you had those settings off.

I believe the routing was only distance and intersection based rather than time-based (since speed limit is less of an issue). I also allowed you to go down the wrong way on one-way streets and would route you along roads that otherwise wouldn't have been routed. I would have loved to see them route for highway turnarounds as well, but that was never a feature before t went away.

This is the only post that directly talks about it:
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/16686

These also mention it:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mkgmap/routing/issues
http://gpsinformation.info/nuvi/nuvireview.html

Wu,

Thanks for the links!!

So if they brought 'Emergency Mode" back, do you think anyone would get ticked off if I coded for an "Emergency Vehicle?"

I mean, I drive a retired Crown Vic Police Interceptor but everyone thinks is a cop car. Fully functional radio antennas and a GPS transponder on the trunk along with spotlight, blackout windows, Kevlar lined doors and the dark car option enabled.

As it is, the cops in numerous states and I all wave at each other as we pass each other and I've been waved through road blocks and a few other benefits of avoiding tickets.

As for the benefit of a powered magnetic mount, there are several,but there are only 2 models that support this configurtion.

The

3597 - discontinued
&
New Garmin DriveSmart™ 70LMT
$349.99 USD

Alanb posted gpscity has some 3597 refurbs that who be avilable soon for about $200 here:

Http://www.poi-factory.com/node/46093

I along with numerous others have the 3597 and after having a magneic mount, ad having the ability to quickly remove the GPS with one hand will likely always want one for various reasons.

But the choice is yours.

Again, thanks for the links about "Emergency Mode."

If battery life is important to you, I don't think any of the newer Garmin models will give you much over an hour unless you turn the screen brightness way down.

Yes, I have come to the conclusion that I won't be able to use the unit to walk around a large city anymore, but if I get the one with a camera attached to it, that's probably gonna stay mounted anyways

I know how much pain you must be in at this time of your great loss.

Did Best Buy assure you they would handle disposal of your old unit, or did you get to keep it?

If you got to keep it, when will the burial services be?

The DriveLuxe 50LMTHD has a powered magnetic mount. I have had one since it came out. The magnetic mount is very handy, I like it a lot.

Imagine throwing away a device, because the battery couldn't hold a charge. This is a great concept in the USA!

get this, and take your family out to dinner with the $200 that's left.

For pete's sake this even has a warranty

http://www.amazon.com/Replacement-Garmin-Nuvi-2597LMT-Instal...

reminds me of when I was in college. The prong on my iron broke off, so my richey-rich roommate said buy a new iron. A dude across the hall who was more grounded said you go to the supermarket, but a new ac plug where you cut off the end, and screw the replacement down. Costs under $2.

Values....

See

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/46099

The 3597 is a solid model and has many good features but I haven't really looked at the newer models recently.

It looks like none of the new units have emergency mode. Our guess at the firehouse is that it was too much of a liability in case someone left it in emergency mode when driving their own personal vehicle. We use Integraph Mobile Public Safety now which has a built-in GPS but it's much clunkier to manually enter in an address and navigate (usually our dispatcher has remotely entered in the address already before we even get to the truck) even if it is much more accurate. Trade-offs I guess...

Nope, didn't get to keep it, the Best Buy guy assured me it would be given a hero's burial (having sat in a medic about once a week, it probably has actually saved some human lives).

Yeah, I'm really surprised that Best Buy's geekquad didn't say they would fix it. The extended warranty plan says it's at their discretion that they take it back and fix the issue or they replace it with a new, like-model unit of equal or greater value, and if no like-model unit was available, they give you a gift card for the original purchase price.

My expectation was that they would take it back for a week and install a new battery (and maybe do something with the firmware that was making the voice activation not working quite right), and that failing that they would offer me the 2589 as that is a comparable model that costs just $10 more, but alas, they gave me a gift card.

Part of me thinks the geeksquad guy was being lazy--he didn't look at it for more than 2 minutes before declaring it unfixable and then took me over to the customer service counter to get my replacement. It could also be that these replacement plans cost a lot ($50 for a $250 device but I also know that no battery will hold a charge after 3 years so I will always at least get a new battery out of it if not a whole new unit) so they want to keep the customer happy and have a low threshold of giving a full refund as they probably make a killing with those kinds of profit margins.

They likely chose not to repair it because it wasn't running Winderz or IOS, with porn pictures on it!

I'm constantly reparing someones PC / Laptop.

My answer to my customers is this: If you take your machine to the "Geek Squad" after I fix it, don't ever bring it back to me!

In every case that I've been involved in, the "Geek Squad" has installed software that identifies itself as being owned / installed by the "Geek Squad".

I got my 3597 in June of 2013 and so far (knock on wood) I've not had any problems with my battery! Watch, next time I go out to the car the damn thing will be dead!

My experience with Best Buy's Geek Squad is extremely poor. I have an older tower I took in for an overheating problem and asked them to check it out and verify if that was the error. After paying their high fee and waiting a week all I was told was the diagnostics didn't show a problem.

Well, DUHH! Yes, there were no issues until the PC had been on for an hour or two when it would shut down. When I questioned the "finding" I was told if I wanted to repay the fee they would check it again. The problem I'm having is the CPU is old enough you can't find heatsinks in stock anywhere.

BOX CAR,

What CPU do you have?

I have a whole drawer full of old CPU heat sinks and mounting hardware that I might be able send.

BTW, you can get a can of compressed air and blow out your machine (heat sink & fan) and it might give it some life.

Get one from these guys and replace the Battery your self, even come with tools!...................

http://www.newpower99.com/

and I've cleaned out the tower many times including replacing the main cooling fan. I've even tried applying new silcon grease to the original heatsink, but nothing seems to work. It's an old HP processor that originally ran XP and was updated to Win 7. That machine wasn't used for much other than a little browsing and email.

But there are several Athlon CPU configuratgions....

I don't know which thermal compounds your using but here's what I do..

I ALWAYS, did I say ALWAYS, clean the CPU and the HS plate with this:

Arctic Silver Arcticlean Thermal material Remover & Surface Purifier ACN-60ML (2-PC-SET) - OEM

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835100...

It's a two step cleaning process. I've used it for years and it's worked really well for me. Long before this was available, I used to wet scrub the CPU and the HS (that's another long and painful diatrib), which was always a dicey move and I managed to only loose 1 CPU doing this trick.

I used to use Artic Silver products but in the past few years I've switched to using this:

Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Thermal Grease Paste - 1.0 Gram Model TG-K-015-R-1g

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1K63CJ00...

And a thiner rather than thicker film of the grease is always better....

And it goes without saying the thermal tape that is delivered on the Athalon CPU HS's always had to be removed.

I don't know if your interested in doing it again, but, this is both the cleaning products and the thermal paste I've been using for a few years now.

A long time ago I even used to water cool my systems. I had a small freezer (about 3 Ft) that wasn't being used. SOooo, I drilled an entry and exit port and ran a tube around in the freezer (there was about 70' of copper tubing inside the freezer) that connected to some plastic tubing on the outside that had numerous junctions on it to cool my CPU, GPU, North / South Bridge... but then I was over clocking these things beyond anything that was reasonable. When we had a power failure, the pump would start up and I could't start the system until I got a water tempature of -10c or 14f. And of course the big problem with this was condensation! Grrrrrr... nothing but problems, but when it worked, it was great, but those damn power failures were nothing but headaches!

Everybody keeps telling me to do it myself--what would the point of that be when I paid $49.99 for the protection plan so best buy does it for me? In any case, they have to take the old unit back when they give me the new unit so I don't still have the old unit in my possession.

No point. People are only trying to help. I would suggest you do what you want to do.

Interesting that they are that detailed on basically a piece of junk. I recently received warranty service on Lenovo T450S and Lenovo did not ask for the old part back, and that part is substantially more than a GPS unit. They merely sent me a UPS label to their recycling facility.

He said he already paid $49.99 for a plan so it's pointless to tell him to DIY.

In this case, maybe only $300 is at stake. But in the real world, my car needed a $3,400 ABS pump job at the stealership. Thanks to discussion on the car forum, I was able to DIY for $250, and it works like a charm. Sometimes in life, there is satisfaction in doing things by oneself in a cost-effective way. It's not what the OP wants to be told in this thread.

to help is all.........................

(What a cool handle!)

Don't sweat it....

That's what the O'l Boy upstairs encourages us to do...

HELP EACH OTHER!

Oh, don't get me wrong, I love my DIY projects. I actually just recently picked up a TV off the curb that someone was going to throw out. (I realized it was a really new model, and the paperwork in the TV confirmed it as such--they had gotten a warranty replacement for a 60" TV after the one on the curb crapped out after 3 months of use). Turns out, all it needed was a new T-Con board and $50 and some elbow grease later, I had an almost new $900 TV. It'd be a nice profit if I didn't want to keep it all to myself!

But I'm not confident in my skills to work on these new-age electronics. Too many horror stories of people breaking their iPhones when trying to put in a new battery or whatnot. I don't trust myself to be delicate enough. Plus, when it comes to something like phones or GPS's where it's something I can't spend 2 weeks to tinker around with because I need it on a daily basis, I'd rather just spend the money to know someone else can take care of it!

We really like our 2589LMT, I think it was around $100 for a refurb that looked like a new unit. If you can find a little more space we also have a 2689LMT for the truck that I like even better with the extra screen real estate.

I've had the 2589LMT for about 3 weeks now, which replaced an 855. The only issues I have with it so far are, the high gloss touch screen is a glare monster, so am looking for a matte finish screen overlay to cool it down. Suggestions?
Also, the 4Square thing seems like a useless app add on which costs me 2GB of additional home IP bandwidth to update. I may stop updating it if that's an option. I'd probably remove it if I knew how. I think I preferred the old system where the POIs are included with the Navteq/HERE base maps. The final complaint is I can't (or simply haven't figured out how to?) adjust navigation setting using real time voice recognition, like I could with my 855. It's not an option on the v/r wake up screen, and I can't find a way to add it. I can adjust brightness or volume by voice command, but not things like navigation preferences (eg: shortest distance versus faster time) or custom avoidances, etc. On my 855, I could adjust most navigation options on the fly, hands free.