Simple to use and the price is plummeting. Crap after sales and the downloads for subsequent "maps" and updates don't always download properly take away the merit slightly. Usually correct but for some reason mine always tries to take me to Sparkhill rather than Balsall Common, when seeking an alehouse I occasionally frequent. You can also download a Basil Fawlty voice to replace the provided Dick or Jane.

Advice on satnavs?!? This is an abuse of this forum. A tenuous link to Bonnie Tyler won't help. I'm going to report it to the boss.
Oh... as you were.

Not if he joins the Tom Tom club.......
(I'll get my carcoat.......)

But they do have a tendency of sometimes taking you the more "scenic" of routes.

Thus my advice would be, regardless of which brand you get always but always make sure you have consulted the map before hand and made sure where the Satnav thinks you are going IS where you want to be and then take the map with you in the event of technical failure.

Is very good but not cheap. If you really must have the best then go for the 930T.

Actually, if you want a really all round device, which plays movies, music, browses the web and does the GPS thing, then the Archos 605 GPS is probably worth looking at. I have the non GPS version and it is my favourite media device by far. However, I can't attest to its navigational ability as I didn't buy that version.

Meandering around French lanes is a constant joy. The road signs are excellent and anyway if you do go adrift, invariably you'll find some hidden village, picturesque view or little cafe around a corner. Do you really want to be bossed about by some wannabee iPod for your whole holiday? Just say no!

BTW - I had an iPod mount fitted in the car by Halfords. Without boring everyone with the whole catalogue of disasters it remained half fitted for months, and eventually (having exhausted all other routes) I wrote to the CEO to complain. Within 24 hours they'd fitted it properly and also sent me a top of the range iPod to say sorry!

These are really excellent. You can get as many or as few as you like, and only spend a few Euros at a time. They can be stuffed into the door cubby hole, and won't attract ASBO (OBAS in French) owners if left in full view.

They contain all sorts of useful information, and are not just limited to the basic "A to B" information. They also double as swatting tools to eject angry insect life from the car whilst in motion.

The only disadvantage is that you will need a navigator, unless you don't mind stopping on the hard shoulder where some cheese-eating gallic road-missiles will shave the paint off your passenger door, layer by layer.

I have such a navigator, called "Wife", who needs a firmware upgrade in order to work with metric units, but other than that performs the task adequately well.

I would suggest a Tom Tom with the downloadable European maps, along with the conventional map. As someone already suggested, work out your route using only the conventional map, then as you get close to your destination, use the satnav.

I rarely use mine but my wife uses it a lot. It always gets her there(eventually), usually in a state of panic after being told countless times "Do A U-Turn".

& download the Mike Strutter voicepack.

Has anyone tried the GPS smart phone root instead of standlone Sat Nav?

Also as public transport user I was amused to see a dad, family in tow obsessively checking his satnav on the bus the other day. Which sounds sensible in London except having spent the entire journey telling us all that they were "almost there" he finally sprang up and hurried his brood off the bus at that hard to find, tricky to spot tourist attraction st pauls cathedral!

A group of us toured Alsace by sat nav recently and although it got us everywhere we needed to be, we often seemed to be taking extremely circuitous routes. Our suspicions were borne out when it told our driver to take a left and leave an A road (or whatever the French call them) and drive west for a bit, then take a right and drive north for a bit, then take another right and drive east for a bit which bought us back onto the same A road, just a bit further up. How we laughed!

I usually rely on point to point routes printed out from the AA or Multi Map.

Small so fits into pocket (essential on hols). Good bracket for the car and loud enough. Have seen it for less than £130. Has a pedistrian mode so is useful for finding where you are when you hit a foriegn city and park in the only space you can find and have completely lost track of where you are.

But make sure you have the address right in Europe - postcodes seem to be a little vague (esp in Spain).

Bloody things. We'd sell them but for the fact that they are invariably found online for the trade price.
Fact 1. You will spend more time looking at it & marvelling that it is accurately showing you where you are now, than the way that it will get you to a location.
Fact 2. You will never ever beat it's ETA, no matter how you try. It is always right. Conversely, when stuck on the 'Route Du Soleil' in four steaming lanes of stationary Peugeots with mattresses and bikes tied to their roofs it is such fun to see how much longer the journey is now going to take you.
Fact 3. It will always drone on with superfluous instructions when you are listening to the good bit in a song.
Fact 4. You will tell it to shut up quite often and still manage to argue with your wife because she should've bloody checked the map as well to see if the thing is right.
Fact 5. The cackhanded mounting device will take all the glovebox space when you park up. It will also be impossible to remove the suction pad from the screen to do this.
Tom Tom is probably best choice. Comments about customer service are right. Buy & download the French maps onto a big enough memory card long before you leave and switch the maps to France. Or get Fraser to do it. Losing your temper with their 'help' staff when you're driving onto the ferry at Dover is not a good start. Believe me.
You should definitely get one, but check the maps first as a mental post-it note. It can give you an unnecessary bum steer, particularly on unfamiliar territory. Lastly, watch that technology doesn't hijack your innate common sense. Mine told me to turn left out of an unfamiliar rural French service area with an obscured exit. So I did, (without remembering that I had to cross the lane first before turning left), straight into oncoming traffic. If I'd been using a map I would never have done it.
Halfords is apparently one of the few retailers making healthy profits at the moment, due to increasing sales of car mounted bike racks, allegedly.

I quite like TomTom but a uptodate map is much more reliable and the road signs in France are quite easy to follow.
I bought one of those DVDs with a hard disc for recording and indeed making copies on other DVDs, cost a pretty penny. Still have yet to record anything on it, never read the instructions but it´s nice to know I have the option.