...can i upgrade from city select 7 to city navigator 9? ... my quest originally came with 'city select 6'.
Rob:
As other forum members have already explained, yes, you can purchase an upgrade, no problem there.
The real question, though, is whether or not you
should purchase an upgrade. Here's what I mean:
Each year, as the cartographic databases are updated, they become significantly larger. There aren't that many new roads being added in each country - new roads by themselves probably only account for a 2% increase in the size of the cartographic data - but every year, more invisible 'road attributes' are added to better describe the roads that are already in the database. By example, back at Version 6, the street in front of your house probably only had the single attribute of being a 'residential street' attached to it. With Version 9, it probably has about 20 attributes attached to it - what the speed limit is, how many stop signs or roundabouts per mile, whether there is a median in the middle of the road, are there any left turn or right turn restrictions, time of day restrictions, vehicle type restrictions, and so forth.
It is the addition of all these invisible road attributes that causes the cartographic database to grow (significantly) from year to year. All this extra data is great, because although we can't see it, it enables the GPSR to do a much better job of creating routes and accurately calculating a time of arrival. The downside, though, is that all this data can overwhelm the processors of older generation GSPRs, and this will result in significantly slower calculations.
As a 'general rule of thumb' (this is very much a rough guideline, treat it as a generalization), you can upgrade the cartography in any GPSR from what it came with (e.g. version 6, in your case) to the next two newer versions (7 and 8, in your case) without suffering any serious performance penalty, and without running out of storage space on the GPSR for the cartography. However - if you plan to make a 'third' upgrade - in other words, upgrade to cartography that is three generations newer than what came with your GPSR - now you are approaching the practical limit of how far you can go and still enjoy satisfactory performance from your GPSR.
It might be better for you to live with what you currently have (version 7) for another year, and keep your money in your pocket, then buy a new GPSR next year. The new one will come with version 9 (or perhaps even version 10, who knows), so you won't have to spend money on an upgrade for at least a year after that. Plus, the prices of the GPSRs have fallen so much over the past few years that it almost doesn't make sense to keep investing money into upgrading maps, memory, and so forth of units that are older than about 3 years old.
What I have said is a generalization, thus it won't apply to everyone, but it is a pretty good generalization. If you only ride within a small area (e.g. the Southwest of England) and don't need to have maps for the whole country loaded, then you will never run into memory constraints. If you generally ride in familiar areas, then the slower recalculation might not be a problem either. Lastly, if you use your GPSR for the moto only, and have no need for one in your car, and you only want to get one specific benefit from the newest cartography (e.g. better coverage of Ireland) that the current version doesn't have, an 'third' upgrade might make sense - because chances are, you really don't need to spend money to get a new GPSR. But, for the rider who covers the whole country, or the rider who also uses the GPSR in the car - and most especially for the rider who travels internationally - original cartography plus the two next releases is normally the limit for any given GPSR.
Michael
and FYI there's no problem in missing out a CN version - or going from CS to CN- you just need to buy the unlock and all should be fine 
Just need to be patient I suppose.
