[Herman_X]

A friend came for a visit this weekend and she asked if I could update her Nuvi 260 with the latest maps. I asked why not just get a brand new gps and be done with it? But she doesn't have a lot of money and told me her 260 had never given her the slightest bit of trouble other than continuously pestering her about the maps being out-of-date (2007 maps).

So, off to work on this problem I began.

It took about an hour, and I am going to post the procedure used that successfully got the 2012 maps on the Nuvi 260 just in case there is someone else out there who may need/want to do the same thing.

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After obtaining the latest North American NT 2012 maps from garmin, here's what I did.

Installed a 2gb sd card to the nuvi.

Downloaded that map - gmapprom to the sd card. (make a folder named Garmin on the sd card and put the new map there). This took almost 30 minutes to transfer to the card.

Once on the sd card, rename gmapprom to gmapsupp (the older name of the map for the nuvi 260).

On the garmin drive itself (not the sd card), I renamed gmapsupp (the original 2007 map) to gmapsupp_old as a precautionary backup and did not delete it yet, in case the update didn't work.

Leave gmapprom.sum alone.

You can delete the contents of the Diag, ExtData, Gpx & RemoteSW folders.

Got rid of all the help files except American_English to conserve space.

Got rid of all voice files except American and British english - also to conserve space.

Checked to see the new maps were installed by going to the wrench icon, settings, map, Map Info - which told me CN North America NT 2012.20 was the latest map.

Rebooted the nuvi, and made a few test runs with locations I knew where not on the old map.

I took the bold step and deleted gmapsupp_old and it worked FINE! (You could back this up if your too scared to delete it but it takes so long to do).

"Safely" disconnected from windows, then rebooted the nuvi and checked the maps again. All was well!

(It did mess up the names of some of the "recently found" locations, but it worked ok with new entries made after the map update).

Finally, I connected it to the web updater and got all the latest voice, text and pertinent updates.

She drove the 250 miles between here and home and reported that the gps worked wonderfully. Said it was finding "new" roads that it had never detected before.