Should of left well enough alone--XL340s question

[Tektronik]

I was almost certain that I had a bad unit because after two hours of conducting a the full format, windows came back and said "windows was unable to complete the format". I was almost ready to throw the thing in the garbage, when I realized I had one more option. I wanted to verify the unit was bad, and not windows 7 being stupid. So I walked over to my wifes MAC, downloaded the latest HOME program off the website, and then went ahead back to my computer and finished steps 4, 5 and 6 of mvl's process. I then took the unit over and hooked it up to the MAC and began a new registration with her e-mail address, "the birthday log" as mvl describes it. Then the free map magically appears on the HOME program! I change the MAC power properties so it won't go to sleep (set to "never") and begin the download and install. One full hour later, and the tomtom xl340s unit is back up and operational!

Three things I've learned:

1) Windows 7 compatibility with tomtom xl340s (at least my units), not so much. There still exists the possibility of non-volitile memory, but it was able to transfer for over an hour on the MAC with no problems.

2) I'm going to advise against hooking these things up to the computers of the families i bought the other three for. I'll tell them that I'll do it for them if they want me to, and update their units when I see them later in the year, or do a backup for them before I come home.

3) you guys here in this forum are awesome! Thanks for all your help! I'll be back in here again when I get back from vacation. I'll probably end up keeping my fixed unit in my wife's car, and buy a really nice one for myself later! What model would you guys recommend?

 

[mvl]

2) I'm going to advise against hooking these things up to the computers of the families i bought the other three for. I'll tell them that I'll do it for them if they want me to, and update their units when I see them later in the year, or do a backup for them before I come home.

I'd recommend you at least get Latest Map Guarantee on your family's devices, even if you do it yourself. I agree - stay away from Windows 7 because Tomtom compatibility has been hit-or-miss with that OS. One of the European tomtom websites has a FAQ that says Tomtom HOME is incompatible with Windows 7.

One member on this forum claimed to be from Tomtom support and said Home 2.8 will support Win7, but there's no way to validate that they actually were from Tomtom.

The Latest Map Guarantee is avaialble 30 days from first power-on/use of the Tomtom (the internal birthday timer is non-user-accessible). And if LMG breaks (happens more often that you'd think) phone support will only honor it 30 days from proof of purchase date

Map 840 is the first time Tomtom has incorporated a large number of mapshare and anonymous data edits, and addded lots of Lane Guidance, so it's a HUGE improvement over the 340's preinstalled map 825.