Imagine the scene: you’re at the café having that well earned coffee and specialist scientific body fuel (OK, cake), chatting with your mates and life feels good. So good in fact, that you completely forget to pick up your Garmin GPS and ride off without it. Now, assuming there are still decent honest people in the world (and most are, contrary to what the mass media seem to want us to believe), the average person will resist the urge to put your beloved device on eBay and instead wonder how they might set about returning it to the owner. Did you know that you can configure your Garmin device to display a customised message when it starts up?
Editing the startup text of your Garmin Edge bike GPS
1. Connect the unit to your computer via USB.
2. Navigate to the files on the internal memory (not the micro SD card, if you have one).
3. Look for a file called startup.txt
4. Open the file to edit it, in something like notepad. Whatever you type here will be displayed when the device boots up later.
Depending on what mapping you’ve got installed, the boot up time can vary. Some people report that it boots up too quickly to read the startup text. Not to worry – you can also include a time delay, just alter the number in the line where it says <display = 0 >
5. Save the file, disconnect from the computer and turn the unit on. Shut it down, then reboot once more.
You should see your custom startup message.
Easy! Please share your ideas in the comments about what message to include in the startup file.
Only 4 lines show on Garmin 520. Anyway to get ride of the logo?
I have no startup.txt in the root folder of my Garmin Edge 1000?
G:\GARMIN\
You can just create one and place it there yourself.
In “Windows” I think you’ll find it in: :\GARMIN\Garmin\startup.txt
On a Mac it’s in /Volumes/GARMIN/Garmin/startup.txt