Help! Pleeaase........

Okay a Friday evening is probably not the best time to ask for help on this sort of issue but here goes anyway.

You want the long version or the short version? Okay I'll try and be brief.

Last year (or was is the year before? I think it could have been) I bought a little Garmin i3 for my vRS when they were knocking them out cheap before they discontinued them. Great little bit of kit.

Fast forward to earlier this year and I bought me my little Polo. It was an ex-VW demo so had the ridiculously expensive factory Sat-Nav fitted. I didn't pay extra for this bit of kit and am bloody glad I didn't as it's nowhere near as good as my little i3 which cost less than a tenth!

My bone of contention with the Blaupunkt thingy is that you cannot navigate via postcode alone. It will do the first half and then you need to know the exact details of the rest of the address. Not ideal for me as sometimes you only have a postcode and perhaps a house number to hand and Frauline Blaupunks iz not happy viz zis. Thing stitched me up big time this afternoon so I swore at it and came home in a bad mood, dug out my old i3 and switched it on.

Here's where my day went from bad to self-destruct.

Little Garmin flashes at me that the map is over twelve months old and I need to update it. I already knew this and was going to anyway as there are some new roads opened where I'm going next week and they aren't in the little i3's database.

So I fire up my trusty computer, get the Garmin disc out and get ready to download a new map from somewhere or other as cheap or free as possible.

The dialog box comes up okay, I agree to the licensing bit and click 'next' then it comes up with a box asking for me to browse for something. What? I sent it in the direction of the Garmin stuff already in my computer and it just says it can't find any files ending in .sz or something similar. Errrr?

Next stop Garmin's download page. Connect everything up as instructed, followed the dialogs and boxes and clicked where it told me to. It said it was deleting something and then it said it was loading something......and when it had finished my little i3 preceeded to tell me it still had an old map on it. Now I'm lost.

I read the i3 for dummies over on pocketgpsworld and that soared right over my head too. I think I have slumped below dummy status in todays technical world and now need someone patient and up for a challenge to guide me through.....pretty please......

Now before you all just tut and go and find something more stimulating to read I can say in my defence that I was schooled in Thatcher's 1980's and never saw a computer until my mate bought a Sinclair thingy that held about as much an appeal to me as catching an STD. So although I can do stuff on Works at work that's about the extent of my knowledge and interest in computers. In my book you go buy something, take it out of it's box and it should work. Computers come out of their box then expect you to go to some shop full of big boxes with little discs in and spend even more money on bits before they'll actually do anything. Why that is is beyond me, you don't get that with a car, TV, washing machine, pair of jeans.......

And yes I really am incomptetant, I have qualifications in electronics so I can fix stuff and know roughly why stuff does what it does but I'm buggered if I can fathom out computers.

Get a Tom Tom Go

That would solve some of my problems for sure but I don't want 3 Sat Navs lying about!!! Plus there's the issue of money involved.

Oh, and my loyalty to my little i3 which is like an old friend.

I would just like to be able to use my i3 when my waste of space factory fitted version can't be used as I don't have full address info. Which is more common than you would think. The i3 is nice and small thus can be tucked away easily when it's not in use. We have Tomtoms in work and they are three or four times the size of the i3 and no better. Plus the i3 has camera positions in it's database where as with a tomtom you need a seperate download from the likes of talex if I'm not mistaken?