Frustrated with Garmin
 

So i've had a 510 for a few years and 3 times i've had to do a factory reset after installing updates... so I don't do updates.

Last week, i went to Scottsdale, Az. on vacation. I rented (2) bikes for me and my son and brought along the 510. It worked fine but when I got home, I noticed the clock changed from EST to MST and didn't switch back. i powered it off an on a number of times and no change. I checked the setting and there's no setting. So I email Garmin and was told the time comes from the GPS satellites. I confirmed that it was seeing them and confirmed by the longitude and latitude on the display. Garmin asked me to confirm that the timezone file was on the device and it was. They sent me their file and told me to copy it onto the device... I did.

I rebooted the 510 and found all my setting were gone... all lost.

So now I did a factory reset and had to add in my 3 bike profiles, 2 activities and the rest of the settings. Luckily all my activities are uploaded to the Garmin's website and Strava.

Anyone else have problems with the Garmin?

I've heard the 510 was buggy. A friend had one, and his elevation was always double anyone else on the same ride. I went straight from the 500 to the 520, no issues.

Gamin. Make decent/great hardware...and then screw the pooch on the soft/firmware.

My issue was/is Edge 800 related, not Edge 510, but it's all Garmin, so....

At one point in the Summer of 2015, when syncing to Garmin Connect, I get an alert that said an update was available for my 800. Despite the horror stories I've read here and on other cycling forums, I foolishly did the update. My 800 was never the same after that. Constant freezes and random shut-offs while riding and when the unit didn't freeze up or shut down, over half the full rides I did were missing information when the sync was complete. I think I'll be using my smartphone exclusively this year when I need to / want to record ride data.

Try the Polar M450. Cheap but dependable.

I rarely ever do updates, and NEVER on microsoft operating systems. If you buy something and it works, use it, if it's buggy take it back. The whole update thing is a scam anyway, it's mostly there to instill brand loyalty in a consumer. Of course a hundred thousand IT gurus will disagree with that, but it's hard to get a person to believe something when their monthly income depends on them NOT believing it.

No. Well, almost never. One glitch in ten years. And between me and my daughter, we've gone through just about every level of cycling and running Garmin they've ever made.

My ONE problem: With my Garmin Edge 1000, for a time, it would reset my heart rate zones to the default settings every time the software updated. Frustrating. But then, they did an update that fixed the problem.

"I don't do updates." <-- I'm thinking this might explain your propensity for problems. Maybe if you slap a "SRAM" sticker over the front display, everything will starting working correctly?

The only problem I've ever had with my Garmin 800 is that the battery eventually (6 years) wore out, i.e. stopped holding a charge for very long. I sent it back to Garmin with $60.00 for a new battery and all is good now.

I rode a double century last Saturday and didn't even have to re-charge in route like I usually do. Still, I know batteries have life-spans and probably always will. I can deal with that.

However, I did have a problem with Garmin Connect for a few days. Every time I added a ride description it took my total mileage for the ride to zero. After an update, however, all is good again.

Rick / OCRR

The Garmin thing reminds me a bit of the mutli generation car brand issues in the mid 70 to late 70's. My Dad would grouse about people buying that Jap junk (Toyota, etc). Meanwhile my moms relatives drove their Jap junk around for 25 years at a time while he spent many weekends laying under his Chevelle wrenching away on something. I try not to get too attached to one brand.

I've updated my 800 every time one was offered. Never a problem. OTOH except to update, I never plug it into a computer, so maybe that's what's different.

I have a 500. My problem is twice a year, after the daylight/standard time change, the unit will not boot up either the first or second time I use it. It just gets stuck on "Working..." and can stay like this for a couple hours. A couple of times I lost my most recent ride data. I've done a couple of different things to cure it based on reading online forums, like delete a particular file. This last fall it wouldn't even load as a drive when plugged into the computer. I just left it on and it eventually booted, at least a couple hours.

Looking forward to March 12th - not!

I have a 305, 705 and 1000.

I've used the 705 for years and 1000s of miles without a hiccup. The elevations were extremely accurate, a little more so than my newer 1000. Original battery still going strong. I felt fortunate as a lot of my cycling friends have had frustrating Garmin issues.

Apparently I did an update recently and the files are now corrupted. It won't even stay on long enough to do a fix.....Makes me sick. Makes me wonder if it was intentional just to make you buy more devices********** So, I just picked up another used 705. The battery stays up much longer on the 705 as the processor is just not handling as much data as the 1000s.