My last two rides.

Things got muddy today. Actually, I just fell in the mud.

I got into Big Red the other day after our 3rd hockey game of the weekend in as many states and noticed the odometer. Big Red has been with us for 10+ years of travel hockey; seven state championships, many dozens of tournaments, many hundreds of games, heart-breaks and triumphs, a few fender benders and countless hours of high quality family time. She has never once let us down. We hope she’ll be with us for a while longer.

It’s been a while since I made a mountain biking update. Here are the last seven.

So I have this Thinkpad that I love (an X201s) that is coming up on two years old and is still perfectly capable. There are of course better spec’d machines available but I just cant justify the expense of a new laptop since this is still acceptable. The one thing I have been watching for some time though are the SSD prices. I figured that an upgrade to an SSD would provide a noticeable improvement and belay any temptation to go for that sweet looking X1 Carbon Thinkpad. This week Microcenter had the last generation Samsung 830 256GB SSDs at a great price of $149.00. I really waffled over the size because I keep just under 200GB on my laptop. I went for the 256GB though since the price per GB was soo low (not so on the 512GB models).

I’ve spent the last couple days restoring and tweaking and getting this new install set up just how I like it. It’s has been an adjustment because I decided to install the latest LTS version of Kubuntu rather than going with the new Unity based Ubuntu that has been so maligned lately. The current KDE is a completely different experience than the Gnome 2.4 I was using for the last few years. I’m liking KDE, it is very highly configurable and has some quite nice features. The Apricorn SATA to USB adapter for laptop drives comes in handy for transferring the data from my old drive to the new installed SSD.

Regarding the upgrade to the SSD it has indeed provided a noticeable and welcomed improvement. The results are what you would expect… faster boots and shutdowns and very fast sleeps and wake-up’s. Application also load faster, filesystem browsing is faster and opening documents is much faster. I also have the addded bonus of not having to worry about bumps and vibrations that make the mechanical spinning drives vulnerable. It was a worthwhile upgrade.