Thread: USB connecting time for various Garmin units

I'm curious about your experiences concerning USB connecting times for different Garmin units and / or different PC configurations.

I.e. time from connecting a Garmin unit (not yet powered) to the USB until the respective drive symbols show up on the computer.

Here are two examples for my units when connected to a Win XP (SP3) machine with USB 2.0 port:

Oregon 300: 22 seconds
Nüvi 1490: 76 seconds

No difference with or without SD card in unit.

I will post results for my Mac soon.

Please post your results, too. Thanks very much!

Mac OS X 10.6.8 USB 2.0

Nüvi 1490: 53 sec
Oregon 300: 24 sec
Nüvi 250: 18 sec

Does anyone have an idea why some units take sooo much longer to connect than others?

Originally Posted by rob63

...

Does anyone have an idea why some units take sooo much longer to connect than others?

There are many factors that could affect your observed timing--just an instantaneous snapshot measurement in an uncontrolled benchmark environment. The first and foremost is the specific design implementation of each of your GPS models (i.e., system/CPU/memory architectures, hardware implementation, coding efficiency, software features, GPS and non-GPS functional capabilities.) The variations are too many between the models to be able to fairly attribute any of these factors to be the primary cause(s) of your observed delays. Unless you're the design engineer that has design specifics of all these models to make the necessary detailed timing analyses and comparisons, it's all speculations and WAGs. All of these factors directly impact and affect how a GPS unit boots up and the amount of time before the USB interface is recognized and connection is established. This seems to be a futile exercise that's not very meaningful IMO...

WIN XP SP3 USB 2.0
(I am allways turn on device before connection)
NUVI 1xxx - less 10 sec
NUVI 37xx - less 10 sec
NUVI 2x5 - depend of software and hardware
NUVI 7xx - more 30 sec (due initial loading map every times - long green stripe)

When I changed device for other series there was 1-2 minute process sometime.