Unless you have a soldering station with an extremely fine tip, a magnifying lens, and the right chip, there are no other solutions except a SD card and no way to increase internal memory. Circuit boards, with their extremely fine parts, are not put together by hand, but by machine, either using a wave soldering process or a baking process. Attempting to replace the chip by hand can very easily lead to a permanently non-functional unit due to solder bridges or cold solder joints that are too small to easily see.


From personal experience with a 200W and its memory constraints, I believe I am familiar with what you are trying to avoid. You don't want to split the map between internal and external memory. I understand that, but Garmin expects to see a gmapprom.img or gmapsupp.img in the internal memory, which makes it difficult. A solution, and one I haven't implemented as of yet, is this.
  1. Take your home state or province and using MapInstall create a map of just that state or province. This map is what sits in internal memory and can stay there, untouched, until the unit dies.
  2. Purchase a 4GB SD card and run MapInstall a second time, transferring all of North America to the SD card. If your computer has a card reader, use that instead of the nüvi. The transfer will be faster since you're using a USB 2 connection instead of USB 1.1.
On the next update, 2012.30, simply run MapInstall to transfer the maps to the SD card once again, then shut off the maps in internal memory, which should not be upgraded. You should then be able to function with just the maps on the SD card.