I am the very proud owner of a Garmin Street Pilot C330, although our love affair almost came to an abrupt halt last night. She came very close to being labeled as trash! However, after a cooling down period, I remembered that she took me on a 12,000 mile trip without a single argument, but better yet without getting me lost in some major cities.

Pending another long road trip, I thought I would treat her to a set of "new" and "updated" maps to insure that we were both working on the same highway. It sounded easy enough to go to the home page of Garmin and for a few dollars, download a set of new maps into "Suzie".

If you are a proud owner of a Garmin GPS, I would now suggest that you go buy a new one if you want to update your maps. Don't get me wrong, I like the product and it has worked well for me. However, their web site is terrible. After several attempts to download the required software in order that I could download maps to my computer and then to "Susie", I finally got to choose the maps that I desired. Really had no use for any other than North America!

After paying my "fee", I was ready to download. Hesitantly, I hit the "download" key. The download page appeared. Only one choice to make, "Continue"! No advance notice, no warning of what you were getting into until the download commenced. I thought to myself that it would take perhaps an hour to give "Susie" a new make over.

This is the point in the evening that "Susie's" life came close to expiring. The download screen informs me now that I have spent my money that the map file is 2.02 GB. I am on DSL so that is no big deal until I noticed the amount of time that was projected to download. The estimated download time was 18 hrs 56 min 45 seconds at a warp transfer rate of 38kb/second.

It was approximately 24 hours ago that the ordeal commenced. The download was finally completed at 7:36 pm this evening. Then it took another hour to feed it to "Susie" from the computer. The good news is that "Susie" is sitting here next to me, her "makeover" was successful and she just took me on a trip from my home to somewhere in New York City.

She is now ready to travel and assist me through some very beautiful country. She had better not screw up or I am going to ditch her for another. "Susie" and I will keep you posted in our travels. Perhaps, just perhaps "Susie" and my wife will get along better on this trip and keep me from having to choose sides as to you is right on that highway change that is coming up in .5 miles.