Gosh, just bought a new Montana 700i, and as an experienced user thought it was a good replacement for my Montana 650 that died because of a crappy leaking powerswitch, a built in flaw making sure it doesn't last more than 5 years. Gosh I'd like to kick the designer up his ass.
My first interactions with the Montana 700i was to make a backup of the fresh device with Javawa Device manager, since I do have some experience with buggy Garmin software, and thank god I did, reasons will follow shortly.
Than I ran the update that Garmin Express offered, firmware, this went okay, hey map updates, well lets run them. CN EU 2021.2 was the first one, this one went okay, then there was an update for the topo maps 2021.10, lets run that, Garmin Express kindly reminded me it was a 3 hour update, okay, go ahead. The update ran to around 70% and than said that something was sort of wrong and to retry, no way José. Garmin 7.6.0.0 trashed one of the Topo Maps, and refused to re-install. It never mentioned anything about the too small storage of the Montana, which per design Garmin is ALWAYS too small, they lack 'thinking future' at Garmin, and have been doing that as long as I use garmin products, but again this was no surprise because some people never learn, and these people all work for Garmin, I kid you not. Anyhow the Montana was kind of trashed, So I phoned my dealer, who repleid that he was getting a lot of trashed devices back too, and not to worry garmin usually fixes it within a couple of days. How ever now ther really messed up, they pulled Garmin express 7.6.0.0, sent out a couple of firmware updates, then came with Garmin Express 7.7.0.0, and did they solve the issue, unfortunately NO. I was glad I had my Backup, and Javawa restored my backup and we were back in business. Since I like to tinker I ran the update fone CN EU and moved these to an SD card. I then went on updating the topo active on the machine, which was sort of succesfull. But Since you travel faster if You are Using CN EU, it is wiser to store it on the device for quicker access, using Topo, you're either on a mountain bike or on foot, so the slower SD can keep up. So Again I updated the Topo Active maps succesfully on the device using Garmin Express. Low and behold, One topo Map was 2021.10 and the other was 2021.11, never seen that before. So I then moved the topo to the 32 GB SD card and Moved the CN EU2021.20 to the Montana, no glitches or errors doing this. So the freshly installed Basecamp update in hand I had a peek to see the maps on the device as you can select them to be used in basecamp. As soon as I select the Topo Active Europe South West I get an error, however the Montana does not complain. So I thought the new Garmin ERxpress 7.7.0.0, released Yesterday was fixed, so I could re-install the topo on the SD card. So what the heck, lets try, so select the topo on the SD an go for re-install......big red error bar, so restart everything, and try again, re-install, big red error bar. So It doesn't work the one thing they fixed was that it didn't trash the topo maps, a very small plus from the previous version of GE, but nowhere near a definite solution. I'm going to Corfu and have set up some trails for hiking, and some routes for driving, we'll see if the device lives up to what Garmin says, but If you plan to buy one, do not and I warn you do not connect it to Garmin Express until Garmin Guaranties Garmin Express is working properly. Better still, leave it in the shop shelf, keep an eye on the forums to see if no one is complaing and happy about a functioning Garmin express + updates, saves you getting frustrated, and maybe Garmin might learn a bit about customer satisfaction. And I wonder if they are going to delete my response, if they do delete it, they are creeps that can't handle founded criticism!
