It has now been confirmed by the Garmin SA technical folk, that recent changes to the Garmin WebUpdater program has made the program safe to use for South African Garmin Nuvi owners.
[WebUpdater: WebUpdater is a free application that lets you update your GPS unit operating system from home. Download it on to your PC once, and then you can check for and install software updates without using your Internet web browser. Simply connect your Garmin unit to your PC, run the WebUpdater from your computer, and it will do all of the work for you.]
The Garmin Hardware Update program (Webupdater) has always been a bit temperamental and it needed a strong (stable), fast Internet connection to work properly. As many South African Garmin Nuvi owners discovered to their dismay, SA Internet connections are rather unstable at the best of times and the slightest hiccup in the connection while updating their Nuvi units caused all sorts of problems. The most common being that the operating system on the Nuvi was being completely corrupted.
Ever since the WebUpdater program first appeared, most SA dealers (the good ones at least) have been advising their Nuvi customers not to use the WebUpdater program to update the firmware on their units, but rather to download the update files manually, from the Garmin.com website onto their PC’s. The update files (.exe file) would then be run manually from the PC.
Recent updates to the WebUpdater program itself have apparently improved the programs capability in dealing with our erratic internet connections. I have personally tested the WebUpdater program extensively over the past few weeks, with a variety of Nuvi units and I can happily report that I have had not one unit corrupted. I have even had one case of electricity load shedding in the middle of an update. With no generator running and no UPS on that particular PC I feared the worst, but I simply turned the unit off, back on again, and when the power came back on, restarted the update without any problems. Oh, happy days! (now, if only we could get someone to do something about that irritating load shedding glitch that keeps occurring across the country … )
Download the latest version of WebUpdater Here.
Changes made from version 2.4.0 to 2.4.1:
- Fixed issue where Garmin installers using WebUpdater were unable to verify that the update succeeded.
Changes made from version 2.3.3 to 2.4.0:
- Added ability to display notes. For example, warning messages about loss of user data will now be shown within the wizard.
- The check for WebUpdater’s own updates has been moved to the first page, so users don’t have to select a device before checking for this update.
- Added ability to display change history for updates.
- Added data integrity checks to ensure that the update file has not been corrupted during the transfer from the Garmin website.
- Fixed error with handling case where the device has no voices installed and there were no voice updates available.
- Handle case where the web browser could not be opened when a user clicks on the additional information link.
- Improved handling of cases where user has multiple devices connected during the update.
- Fixed issue where buttons would get cut-off when the Windows Taskbar was at the top of the screen.
can my garmin nuvi be traced. was stolen on 26 march pls help
@ Luciano: Sorry, Garmin GPS receivers are receivers only, they do not transmit their position to anyone else. You can report it stolen to Garmin SA (you will need a police report / case number and the unit serial no.) and they will then blacklist the unit. This will prevent anyone else being able to update the maps or registering the unit in their name.