650's Free Space

Short answer, No.

Long answer, backup before you do it.

If you have backed up the manual, go ahead and delete it. It saves much needed space. You can also delete other languages as well that you will never use. I backed these up as well and deleted them.

I was also going to suggest deleting the unused languages. Since space really is at a premium, I was overjoyed when deleting all of the languages except for the English ones gave me hundreds of megs of more space available.

I did of course first back up the entire Garmin on to my computer.

You can also delete vehicles that you don't use and jpgs and mp3s.

I wish there was a way to do this on the C340 units. There are so many languages in the thing that are not being used and will never be used.

If anybody has any ideas please share them.

I've not gone too far with this (because I haven't got a C3xx), but...you did say any ideas...

If you unpack one of the installers for the C3xx voices, you'll notice that it contains Updater.exe and voicefilename.rgn (where voicefilename is something along the lines of English_British_Emily_0140.rgn.

Maybe you could make dummy versions of the voices you want to delete, that have everything stripped out except the header, so that they're much smaller. These could then be used to overwrite the ones in the unit, thus releasing space.

There is nothing to say that this could actually be made to work. Also, there is nothing to say that any space released in this way, could actually be put to use for other purposes, such as loading POI's.

Here's the help from UPDATER.EXE

Usage: Updater may be run with the following options:
- Name of file to send to the unit
[/i] - Updater should be run in installer mode
[/k] - Updater should keep running after a successful transfer
[/u ] - Name of the GPS being transferred to
[/autorun usb|serial] - Updater should autodetect a USB or serial
device and begin transfer immediately
[/checksum_check rgn= chk=] - After transferring
data to the region specified, Updater will
request the unit to checksum this region
[/unlock_check fid= pid=] - Before transferring
data, Updater will ensure that the user has
unlock codes for the given family and product.
[/sacrifice_maps rgn=] - Updater will ask the unit if
is large enough for the data it will receive.
If not, MapSource maps will be erased to make
room.


This is beyond me.....

After deleting all the unused languages, manuals, vehicles, jpgs and mp3s, is it possible/necessary/worthwile to defrag unit's internal files? even most of the units are using flash memory, would this be speeding up the internal processes?

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/4080 and
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/6681 will probably answer your question.

RT

Thank you, retiredtechnician, for the heads up! even I'm religiously reading this forum, that topic might have slipped through the cracks... shame on me!
Anyway, after being thoroughly enlightened, I'll definitely follow thetick's advice and stay away from defragging ANY flash memory (usb flash drives, memory cards, gps') device and I greatly recommend the same for all the gps users out there: don't abuse your unit's internal memory by endlessly erasing/writing all kind of stuff! better use external SD cards, they're much easier (and less expensive...) to replace just in case.

Waynelee just make sure you back everything up before you decide to delete files.

Thank you for all your comments. I did backup my system to a PC, deleted the PDF manual file plus the unused voices, and other unused files. And, NO, I did not do a defrag! In addition to gaining a lot of space, my system appears to have a faster response time, especially when refreshing the map screens.