Fancy Driving A Tank (Or A Pirate Ship) Down The Local High Street? Now You Can With Free Garmin Custom Vehicles For Your GPS Sat Nav!
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Why stick with that boring Blue Arrow or the normal vehicles pre-loaded on to your new Garmin Sat Nav, when you could have a Tank, Pirate Ship, Police Car or any of a dozen different designs? TomTom may have funny voices, but Garmin have custom 3d vehicle icons, and although they won't get you there any quicker, they are a bit of fun and help to personalise your GPS Sat Nav. In this little guide we're going to show you how. (Compatible with Nuvi, Zumo and Streetpilot 500 series). |
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Before we do anything with our GPS it's good practice to back everything up to your hard-drive. Connect your Sat Nav to your PC and then go to "My Computer" (From Start Button on XP). You should see the Garmin appear as a removable storage device. We're going to be copying the entire contents of the Garmin and putting that back-up on our pc hard-drive or usb memory stick. For a Nuvi 200 you'll need about 250mb free, other devices will need more. Right-click the Garmin Icon and select copy. Then go to "My Documents" or your USB Flash Drive, create a new folder called "Garmin Back Up" go into the folder, then right-click, paste. Your device is now backed up and we can safely continue. |
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Lets head on over to the Garmin Garage to see what Icons are available. Make sure you read the instructions on how to install. Remember, you won't be able to have all the icons on your Garmin GPS, they take up too much memory. |
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We're going to downloading the whole pack of vehicles from this page, then installing the ones we want. Once at the page click the "Download Now" link., and save the file to your hard drive. |
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Either double click on the file, or right-click "extract here" and you'll end up with a load of ,srf files, which are our custom icons for our Garmin GPS. You'll notice at this point that the names on Garmins' "All Vehicles" page don't match with the downloads. To find what filename a particular vehicle has, go back to the All Vehicles Page and hold your mouse over the car or name, and if you've got your status bar activated you'll see the file name at the bottom of the screen. I want to put the "Diablo" on my Nuvi 200, so I right click "carflames1.srf" and press copy. |
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Next make sure your Garmin is connected to your pc. Go back to your "My Computer" Window - Start, My Computer, then double click Garmin, then double click the next Garmin folder. You should now be at a screen something like this. Double click the "vehicle" folder. |
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You should now see something like this, but with not as many files. This is where all the vehicle icons are stored inside your Sat Nav. Right-click then paste. |
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That's it! Close down the windows and disconnect your Garmin. Turn your GPS on, or it may be booting up anyway. Press the spanner (or wrench) on the main menu. Press "settings". Press "Map" then "change" next to "vehicle". If you press the up and down arrows you can see the icons, just select the one you want, then "ok" and go back to the map screen. You should now have a funky vehicle rather than the boring default ones. How easy was that! Thanks for reading. |
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