IN T' NET

An occasional Basketball Diary ... (from Yorkshire, in case tha'd not noticed)

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03/12/04

Well, regular readers of this column (what sad lives you must lead!) will recall how excited I was when I first signed up to Broadband, back in the Summer. Still am, come to that, but it soon became apparent that whereas I could download from, and upload to, the Internet at what seems an incredible speed, processing that information on my steam-driven machine was positively pedestrian by comparison.

So, on Tuesday  took the plunge and sent my computer off to have a complete makeover - new motherboard, upgraded RAM, and, most importantly of all, a new processor.

Got it back on Tuesday night (yes, that soon), and what a difference! AMD4 processor! I'll swear it's so fast that it's written the next three paragraphs before I've typed them.

So, you may ask, how come that's held me up? Surely it should have speeded me up.

Well, I realised that unfortunately the upgrade would probably result in the loss of all the information on my hard disks (and so it proved, as the new setup refused to deal with them, so we had to reformat and reload from scratch). So, after finishing work on Monday night (always busy, with updating results and tables throughout the day, and adding match reports, so by then it was already after midnight) I stayed up to back up every single file - and by the time I'd finished that (and downloaded some onto my laptop, so I could still work on Tuesday) it was so late that I daren't go to bed for fear of oversleeping and not being able to deliver the computer for seven o'clock.

It's taken me most of the rest of the week to get over that one sleepless night (I wonder if the NHS do similar upgrades on clapped out, outdated human beings?), and what with having to reload all the programmes, and all the saved files (not to mention resetting the internet connection, and then overcoming two virus attacks that got in during the brief interval when you have to have your Firewall and Anti-Virus switched off), there's not really been much time for owt else.

Anyway all systems are now up and running smoothly (which is more than be said for me!), so I (and you) should begin to reap the benefit in the coming weeks.

As for this weekend - at least the Voicemail's working properly now that the equipment at the EIS has been renewed, but I've got to go over to North Wales again for a couple of days. So, I've made sure my laptop's in good working order, and should be able to complete the necessary updates to results and so on, but perhaps not quite as often as usual. We'll have to wait till I'm home on Sunday night for any reports that Clubs send - and maybe even till Monday, depending on how tired I am when I get back.