Magellan 3250 Maintenance

Hi, here is some information on trying to maintain your Magellan GPS. Since Magellan is using Windows CE, I thought it may be good to run some of the Windows Desktop programs such as Microsoft Disk Cleanup and Error Checking (AKA Scandisk or CHKDSK).

I plugged the Magellan 3250 into the USB port on the desktop using older XP and then opened Windows Explorer. Right clicked on the Magellan's drive letter and clicked on the TOOLs tab. In there I checked the drive for errors. It said the drive was in use and had to schedule for the next reboot. I rebooted but it must had thought the Magellan plugged into the USB port was a boot-able device and it hung at the black screen with a non flashing cursor. I turned off the Magellan and pressed reset on the computer and when it went past the BIOS screen and started loading Windows, I turned on the Magellan. After a few seconds the Windows start screen changed to the blue screen stating the drive was going to be checked. CHKDSK checked the drive and it did hang on some of the percent done numbers like 1% or 6%, but it did make it through to the finish eventually. I was surprised to see it found some drive errors and corrected them. Upon finishing the drive's error checking I ran Disk Cleanup. It found some strange leftover, System Restore: Obsolete Data Storage files and I allowed Disk Cleanup to remove them. I did the same procedure to another Magellan 3250 we had and it went without any hangs (it does stay at 6% for a while then jumps to 70%, 83%, 90%, 95% then counted upwards to 100%) and it did not find any errors on that particular Magellan.

I did run Disk Defragmenter on a secondary Magellan we had. It looked to be about 60% fragmented, but it only defragmented the two blue halves and put them together. The rest of the drive remained fragmented. No real success there. One person on the internet said his Magellan GPS was slow so he copied all the files to his computer's hard drive, formatted the GPS, then copied the files and folders back, but in a specific order... so he said. I am not sure of the order at this time, but copying back files that would make them contiguous and may speed things up. Furthermore the formatting of the GPS drive would reveal and deal with any bad sectors (although running Disk Error Checking does this too). Here is a site that another poster said to Defragment and still another said a copy, format and copy back helped them. http://forums.gpsreview.net/discussion/24682/roadmate-2136t-lm-updates

Another item I would like to mention is a found Boot Time Screen. If you hold down the internal Reset button, and turn on the Magellan at the same time, a boot screen appears. Be careful! I did not open or adjust anything there. I looked at it then hit the Reset button to reboot the Magellan. I did not want to ruin anything by experimenting.

Hope this helps others.