Badminton joy

Today wasn't shaping up well at all. I was still annoyed at the failure of the Inspiron last night, and work wasn't inspiring. Fortunately Rob suggested going to his for food before badminton this evening as Em had a match on. I hoped that this would prevent an evening of moping over the Inspiron. The day didn't improve though as I somehow trapped my hand in the car door on the way out, causing much pain.

Fortunately a rather nice pasta dish made by Em which was followed by Wispas cured some of the grumps and this was followed by probably one of the best badminton evenings I have ever had. It's not often I come away feeling that I played really well but tonight I was kicking bottom and taking names. One of the things I've always had difficulty with is working out where to be on the court. I had a game with Marge who has knee issues and now foot problems and so she can't get around the court as well as she used to. Somehow this suddenly made it very clear what I had to do and I found myself hurtling around the court returning all sorts of shots that I usually miss. The next game went pretty well and even though I was paired with She Who Is Not Nice, we actually won the game. Hopefully it isn't a fluke. It's evenings like this when I get all inspired and decide that exercise is a good thing, but usually that feeling is gone the next day. I was worried about my hand but it seems OK.

Investigated options for the Inspiron during my lunch break. Apparently it's not Dells fault. Nvidia made a whole load of crappily made graphics chips that overheat and fail after a certain amount of time. The so-called 'fix' was to release a BIOS version that runs the fans more. It's too late for mine though, it's definitely fried. A replacement card is a possibility but it's expensive for a new one. However the place I bought it from actually offers a repair service so that might be worth a look. Either way I can't afford to do anything about it for a while yet, so it'll have to sit in the corner in disgrace. The other option is to either sell it for spares on Ebay or part it out, neither of which really appeals because I really like it as a machine.

And if anyone says I should have bought a Mac, then get this: I bought a brand new iBook back in 2002 and the hard drive failed in it in 2005. So Macs aren't perfect either. And that wasn't Apple's fault either, it had one of those ultra crap IBM Travelstar hard drives in it which were notorious for failing. Luckily I knew it was going so I had a backup, and the dead original 20gb drive was replaced under warranty with a 40gb, so it was all good in the end.