TopoActive Europe 2020.10: Map Update Error

Forerunner 945 : Map slow to load. Slow to scroll. Fails to draw when zoomed out. Route calculation fails to complete. Maps fails to redraw just in normal use  sometimes too. Garmin do this *every time* they update these OSM based maps. Not occasionally - *every time*. Their quality assurance is repeatedly, astonishingly, shockingly, laughably poor and has now been so for years. The only solution I can see is to buy polar...

(Reinstalling the maps does not resolve the issues.)

Thanks. That doesn’t seem deterministic tho... I suspect the watch is indexing or caching the new map in the background and the repeated reinstalls just allows for the passage of time for these processes to complete. In general doing anything exactly the same way as previously will produce the same result (so something else is going on that we are not aware off). As users our black-box analysis of these cases is very prone to confirmation bias. In any case the user experience here is terrible isn’t it - if someone enters this space with a ‘it just works’ product Garmin will be severely challenged. 

After the Update, my Garmin Watch is dead... When i make a Reset the screen "LOADING FIT files...." freezes everything,... nothing helps! -> Any tips?

This update made my garmin to load a map for 45 minutes...Had to reinstall maps 6 times, before it turned back to normal.

No it isn't... It would be interesting to know what the root cause is, but even if Garmin would fix it happening we won't still know what was the problem and trying to figure out the root cause is pretty hard.

I tried to get some sense for it, but nothing interesting last time it happened...

forums.garmin.com/.../968244

Oh.. power on was under 30s.. now my power on is 1minute. Interesting.

But the map files were identical, the .gma files had different checksums. Which are the map activation files. This does not much make any interesting information why it's happening. It doesn't seem to be because of the map or map activation files.

And talking about deterministic.. I did delete all my maps. Did hard reset + reboot and clocked:

18s - No maps
19s - Coverage maps
5min 6s - Coverage maps + Topo Europe

So again failure, but this time after map install I didn't get the looong loading maps, but it was done quickly, but the bootup time was slow.. About twice as slow when I did get the long loading maps after map upgrade...  So again different result, different times. This is just mind boggling.

And now I have to just reinstall and reinstall to get it working again... But it's time to sleep, so the quest has to continue tomorrow.

Also tested that is that 5s delay pressing start there even if I don't have any maps. Yes it's there. 

I was about to try a factory reset of the device but when this has happened in the past it hasn’t helped. POI and around me functionally seems broken as well. Any attempt to display local poi’s or use the ‘around me’ function results in an ever spinning loading maps icon. I suspect the best workaround would be to install  and use third party maps (I’ve used openfeitmaps in the past which are pretty good). 

Actually it did eventually load the ‘around me’ map - it took about five minutes though. Selecting a location 400m away and selecting ‘go’ resulting in route calculation that never completes (or at least I have left it for several mins and it’s still ‘calculating’). So in essence whatever Garmin has done here has fundamentally regressed performance.