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I was planning on getting some serious cycling done this weekend – well, I was last weekend but things have conspired to stop that happening. Last weekend I had some serious computer problems – I thought my hard disk was dying so spent most of the day doing backups and trying to rescue stuff and it seemed ok at the end of the day. The following day I spent fixing my step sisters computer and that turned in to an all day affair, although I did manage to get out for a walk in Sherwood whilst it was running some disk repairs.

So, after a weekend like that, this weekend I REALLY wanted to get outside. Over the course of the week though my computer was playing up again, randomly powering off – it seemed that my diagnosis of a disk problem wasn’t correct and there was something more serious going on. On Saturday morning it wouldn’t even boot properly – I did some testing by systematically removing disks, memory, any cards that were plugged in but the motherboard wasn’t playing. Bugger!

So, off I go shopping trying to get the cheapest thing necessary to fix it – which would be a motherboard – due to it’s ancient specification (a P4, 3.06GHz) I couldn’t find anything that would fit both the processor and the memory. That meant either getting a new motherboard and a processor and maybe my current memory would fit, or buying memory as well. A further complicatin was that AGP seems to be old hat now and graphics cards use PCI Express – so something else that wouldn’t fit. And on top of all this, I’d have to take my old box apart and re-build it from scratch.

So, I started looking at some low cost machines that came without monitors for a close match that I could use as the basis for adding in lots of my components to make the job easier and easier to repair in the future. I found one that would do the trick but it was out of stock so I then started going up spec slightly! The upshot of all this is that I now have a machine with a AMD 64 3700+ processor and the memory from my old machine fitted the job perfectly so it’s also got 2GB of DDR400 memory. My old hard disk fits too – along with the one that was in there (Serial ATA these days – another technology change!) – so there is 500GB of hard disk space in there. So, out of death rises a monster really – and to use a technical term, it goes like stink! I’ll be selling a few old bits on Ebay to take the curse out of having to buy this though!

So, 3 weekend days wasted on computer stuff, I was going nuts! – So I had to get out today come what may, it could have been raining fire and brimstone and I wouldn’t have cared. As it turned out, it was overcast but quite warm so I had a nice trip through Sherwood Forest and up to Clumber Park and explored a bit up there – so much so that at one stage I wasn’t sure where I was – which is quite impressive because I thought I knew these places quite well!

After reading Leigh’s blog entry this morning I was even more determined to get outdoors. I’ve definitely felt a bit slobby since Christmas. So, I took the GPS out with me to record a few stats and also have a look at the route when I got back – I don’t do this as often as I should and will try and do more of it this year. I would upload a little map to show where I ended up going but I discover that serial ports are old hat as well so I can’t plug my GPS into the computer until I get a £5 Serial to USB converter from Ebay. Oh well! – looking at the GPS screen reveals the following:-

• Distance: 24.3 Miles
• Moving Time: 2 Hours 17 Minutes
• Stopped Time: 14 minutes 27 Seconds (Dinner!)
• Moving Average: 10.6 Mph
• Overall Average: 9.6 Mph
• Maximum Speed: 27.8 Mph
• Total Ascent: 372 Metres

That was all offroad and sections of it were like cycling up a mud slide! (Marvellous)