your gps is too old, my dude

A followup to the oldest usable Garmins of sorts.

I periodically receive communications concerning old and sometimes really old Garmin nuvi navigators since I know a lot about them. Whether I actually answer those communications depends on what's being asked.

If the vibe of the communication is along the lines of, "I'm asking for help, but what I actually want is for you to take time out of your life and fix my problem for me, totally for free", nope, thanks for playing. I'm not your personal free tech support. And you gotta love it when they end it with, "Thanks in advance!" Anybody who says that should be slapped.

Or, if the communication is a wall-o'-text accompanied by several giant attached images (hello, rude), no, not reading that. Sir, I use NeoMutt and I'm not detaching your dumb images, nor will I read the tome you wrote. In instances like that, I will call upon Jesus's lesser known dopey cousin Yeezus, as in, "YEEZUS! The hell is this happy horseshit?!" Yes, I know I'm going straight to hell. See you there.

Old crusty dudes aren't the only ones who do this, although a fair amount of them are. Crusty bought a then-expensive nuvi back when it was new, wants to keep it working, doesn't know how to do it, bounces around forums to try to get people to do it for free, nobody does, he searches around more, finds me, then bounces a communication my way to see if he can sucker me into being Free Tech Support Guy for him. Nope. Go back to the forums, Crusty.

The other type I get fix-my-stuff-for-free communications from is Son of Crusty.

Son of Crusty finds dad's old nuvi and asks if he can have it. Crusty replies with, "Yes, Son of Crusty, I bequeath my old navigation tech to you. Fear not its dim screen, dead battery and aged plastics, for it shall serve you well. Go now. Navigate to the package store, and return with a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon."

Before Son of Crusty can embark on his perilous journey to the package store, he has to get Ye Olde Nuvi to work first.

Unfortunately, Son of Crusty hasn't got a clue how to go about that since it uses tech completely outside of what he knows.

Let's say it was a nuvi 360. Too old, my dude. That 2006 model was released before multiple map image support and before Lifetime Maps. And I'm not about to explain memory card types, FAT32, USB mini connectors, and how to use workarounds with the 360 file system to support more than one map image (doable, but not easy).

A nuvi 360 is 20 years old as of 2026. It's my belief that tech ages 3x as fast as real life does, at least where consumer electronics are concerned. Yeah, I'm saying 20-year-old tech might as well be 60 in human years.

This is why I say the nuvi 200 white-sticker serial (meaning not gray-sticker) is the oldest usable nuvi. True, a 200 is just slightly younger than a 360, but with far less bullshit involved to update the maps with an OpenStreetMap replacement.

You have to be a bit of a nerd to even get a 200 working, but that's as far back as you can go for old-but-usable. And by usable, I mean a single nuvi using a single memory card with map data to navigate you anywhere in the United States. A 200 can be made to do that, but the 360 (or any other like model such as 350, 370, 660, 670, 680) cannot.

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