I just bought Tomtom 540S two days back. I was kind of skeptical with the map updates and activation code not working, after reading through so many reviews related with update failure etc. So I started with a full explorer backup of the device at windows level. It took about 45 minutes. Then I took another backup using Home software. That was another 45 minutes. Then I deleted unwanted voices to free up some space.

Tomtom 540S probably removed some 30-40MB of space. There was close to 400MB free after this step.Then I entered the activation code for lifetime free map updates using the Home software. It worked fine (at least it did not give me any errors). Then it detected that there is new versions of map available for download. I downloaded the new maps, which took another 20 minutes or so, and took further 30 minutes to update the device. The downloaded size of new maps was about 1.7GB, whereas the previous versions of maps occupied 1.43GB. Now my device has close to 60MB free out of the 1.9GB memory it has. So overall, I did not face any issues earlier reviewers of TomTom XL 540s had mentioned. I also downloaded the GPSquickfix. For the safety camera, when I had entered Canada as the home country, it did not show any information available to download.

But after I switched it to US (from within HOME software), then it showed the data for US-Canada safety cameras, and I was able to download them. So overall, I did not face any issues earlier reviewers of TomTom XL 540s had mentioned. Regarding performance, I was pretty impressed with the speed it took to acquire satellite signal. I have a four year old HP-IPaq GPS (which runs TomTom software), and this new one is much faster than the HP one. Now before I made this purchase, I had bought Garmin 755T last week. I did not like it for one main reason that it did not have up to date maps of my area (especially it didn't show my home even after 7 years it is on TomTom maps). I updated the maps to latest, and still didn't show my home. Contacting the customer support for Garmin was a pain, with 30-40 min. of wait every time I tried to call them. Tomtom 540S was a breeze to contact TomTom support. First time I was connected instantly, and every time after that, it took only few minutes to get connected. Finally, I did not like the colour schemes and sounds which came with Nuvi. May be that is my personal preference. But Garmin is not too much customizable, pretty basic stuff you can configure. So it went back within few days. Hope this review will be useful to you all.

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