Suppport Thread for the TND 500, TND 700 or future Rand McNally products.

Disregard this post-thanks. Fixed the problem by not fixing the problem.

 

So, here's a quick summary (review) based on several weeks of testing this new software over here (and some new things that stuck out with what you will see different after the update)

- They added new alerts for hills and sharp curves, upcoming road construction areas, time zone, and speed limit changes. All of these are additional helpful features during navigation and all are configurable for you to turn on or off at your discretion.

- They added the "Am I Close" feature that starts showing the building numbers (addresses) "ticking by" at the bottom of the screen when you get close to your destination. This is very cool, especially at night and in low visibility conditions.

- They made significant enhancements to the "logging miles by state" feature so that it now breaks it down by quarter, separates it by toll and non-toll miles, by day or state, and can now be exported via the dock onto your computer. This greatly improves the ability to take the miles being logged to assist you with your IFTA fuel taxes.

- They added an "Expanded Search" button to help when the street you are trying to search for may be in a nearby town and not in the one given by a dispatcher.

- The current county you are in has been added to the status bar.

- They added the option to change your timers (the daily log stuff) to "Automatic" if you want. This greatly enhances this feature for those of us who either forget, or do not want to manually change our driving / not driving status manually all of the time.

- They added options to separate some things depending on whether you are in "Car mode" or Truck mode" - like the maintenance counters, odometers, mileage logging, daily log timers. You can have it not do these things now when in car mode if you so desire.

- You can now control whether or not it "recalculates" the current trip when you go off-route. If you choose this option, it will put up a big red icon in the upper-left (where your next turn arrow usually is) and it won't recalculate when you go off-route unless you press that button. This is very helpful if you are taking a minor detour or pulling off temporarily to a rest area or truck stop.

- They put in a "highway view" button on that slide-out turn-by-turn direction on the right side of the screen. This means that it will tell you all of the "major" highways and interstates ONLY for your current trip and not each individual tiny turn that you are going to take. This helps because sometimes it is difficult and time-consuming just to get a quick summary of which major routes it's telling you to use. You can also toggle it back to show all turns with one click any time.

- They added French and Spanish languages for our neighbors to the north and the south.

- They added over a dozen new icons to change "your truck" displayed on the screen into different things. While this is certainly no factor affecting it how it navigates you, I am still enjoying my tank on the screen.

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On top of those program changes they also tweaked the routing algorithm, or "how it decides," which turns to take. A BIG PART of that (many of you have reported here also) is when it penalizes sharp turn on-ramps to freeways and tells you to take a "long way around" when getting on or off freeways. It looks like this is greatly reduced now, which is great because it was pretty annoying.

- They fixes various other bugs including searching for truck stops along route.

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On top of all of that, when it finishes this update, it will now ask you if you want to get the latest maps, and they are not charging for them at this point, which is also significant.

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Our experience on the actual update process and words of CAUTION.

- Make sure the unit is well-charged before starting.
- Make sure that your laptop is plugged into power and not running on batteries. I'm not sure exactly what would happen in terms of your power settings (like going into hibernation or sleeping) in your Windows settings, but I didn't take any chances and turned all of that stuff to off for now.
- The actual program update didn't take that long. So no unusual worries there.
- BUT!!!!! When it asks you if you want to update the maps - MAKE SURE THAT YOU HAVE SOME SERIOUS TIME AND ARE ON A FAST INTERNET CONNECTION. I am on a 25 Meg/sec connection in my office and it still took over 2 hours to completely get the maps. On a typical air-card connection or some of the slower home DSL or cable connections this would translate to about 5 - 10 hours. AND it would use up nearly half of your monthly bandwidth allowance on most aircard plans.

Basically be prepared to walk away from it and let it do its thing for a while. The on-screen prompts throughout this process are very self-explanatory; just follow along.

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The feature items above are certainly not "all-inclusive" but they are big ones. Rand had to have done a huge amount of coding for this release and they did a great job of "rounding out" some of the existing features of this brand, and added some much "requested" new features. And free new, updated maps.

It is an excellent upgrade effort made by Rand in our tests and our opinion. I will change our comparison chart to reflect these differences soon as well.

 

On this update.

What other choices do users have? Download only or ?

I run a netbook, so no DVD/CD drive.

While I could download, I don't have several hours to do that.

 

Does this update fix:

- True multi-stop routing, instead of simply reloading the next stop. We really need to see the whole route, and the total mileage

- Mileage to each turn(garmins do this)

- Staying on full brightness for a minute or two when turned on at night

- Increase detail in maps

- Better warning when battery running low

- Screen to bright at night

- Any setting for max cruise speed to properly calculate ETA. Or maybe the unit can just pay attention to how fast you usually travel?

- Improved Canadian mapping/routes/detail/labels

On an unrelated note it seems as though my unit doesn't charge correctly. If you just jiggle the 90 degree connecter it will constantly connect/disconnect. Unable to determine if it's the unit or the cable. Is it ok to use any standard 12V to mini-usb connector?

 

Is your netbook capable of an external drive? You could also network it to another computer that has it and transfer it over.