{"id":24549,"date":"2026-08-31T15:03:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T13:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=24549"},"modified":"2026-08-31T15:10:01","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T13:10:01","slug":"no-mercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/no-mercy\/","title":{"rendered":"No mercy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had an horrendous last couple of weeks. All I’ve wanted to do is let my lawn robot tick over keeping my grass under control while I finished replacing the damaged screen in my Savannah but events have totally prevented me from doing this. Yes, the lawn robot has continued doing its job but problems with my computer(s) have kept me indoors and well away from anything to do with my aircraft. <\/p>\n

The computer problems have involved a serious loss of data due to equipment malfunction and specifically the failure of a hard disk drive that contained much valuable data, including the engine hour records for the Savannah. When I acquired the aircraft it didn’t come with engine and airframe log books the way a British registered aircraft would have. Instead I received only partial records in an Excel spreadsheet which I continued to maintain. However, that’s now gone together with all of the photographs from when I first acquired the aircraft that might have helped me to rebuild the record.<\/p>\n

This is the second hard disk drive that has let me down since I’ve been in France and on both occasions I’ve lost valuable data as a result. As my computer is so valuable to me because of all the valuable data it still holds, such as photographs and videos, I decided that I needed to avoid it ever being able to happen again by building another machine which will essentially be a mirror of my main machine and holding the same data. However, my every attempt at doing so over the past couple of weeks has been thwarted, mainly because storage drives that I’ve acquired from China, three of them, have all failed while configuring the new machine.<\/p>\n

But not only that. In the process it appears that I might have inadvertently wiped another disk drive that contained mainly old data that I rarely had need to consult but which I’d have liked to keep. It may be possible to recover that data using special software but I won’t know for sure until I’ve received yet another storage device that I’ve had to order and have not yet received. <\/p>\n

But that’s not the last of my computer woes. I recently upgraded the processor in my main machine and was going to sell its original processor on LeBonCoin because it is still in high demand. However, I now won’t be able to do that as I’ll have to use it in my proposed back-up machine. I therefore thought that I was putting my problems behind me, but it wasn’t to be so. Up to the end of last week the new processor had been working flawlessly but I suddenly noticed that the machine was beginning to run very slowly. When I checked I found that the processor’s temperature was right on its upper limit so had to switch the machine off to avoid potential damage even though the processor, an Intel Core i5-14400f, has built-in overheating protection. <\/p>\n

Because both this processor and its predecessor are of quite high power they both need an efficient cooling system. The system I chose when I built my main compute in early 2022 uses water cooling. It works much the same as a car’s radiator using a liquid coolant which is pumped around through small radiators that have air blown through them by electric fans. My immediate suspicion, confirmed by AI analysis, was that the electric pump had failed and this seems to be so as when the computer is running and the processor temperature is building up you can’t feel any hot coolant in the tubes connecting the processor to the radiators. The image below shows what I’m referring to.<\/p>\n

So it appears that quite by coincidence I have also lost my main machine together with much of the valuable data on it and have also been prevented for the time being from building a secondary back-up machine. I have a replacement cooling system on order which should be arriving the day after tomorrow but in the meantime I dare not use my main machine for fear of losing even more data and am typing this on my old faithful machine that my current main machine replaced in 2022. It must by now be pushing 10 years old, runs Windows 10 as distinct from the hot mess that is Windows 11, starts and runs quickly enough for general use (but not for data intensive applications like video production), is reliable and never lets me down.<\/p>\n

But guess what. My problems have since taken another turn. I love my lawn robot, see the image below, and it saves me an enormous amount of time by keeping my grass in trim while I do other things. In fact it does a much better job than I do with my ride-on lawn mower. However, it seems to be a bit like a Range Rover – great while it is working but leaving something to be desired in the reliability stakes. Early yesterday evening while it was tackling the last 25% of the grass at the back of my house it ground to a halt. It reported that its wheels were spinning, which they weren’t, and when I ordered it to return to its charging station it wouldn’t budge. Then when I’d returned it there manually it reported that it couldn’t exit again despite the battery showing 100% charge.<\/p>\n

The Chinese supplier who has always provided superlative customer support can diagnose the machine over the internet and has reported that there has been a failure of the drive motor control board. They have kindly offered to send me yet another brand new machine, my third, and have told me that I can hang on to my current machine and not return it, which I think is absolutely unbeatable. Nevertheless, it’s still rather concerning that in the short time I’ve been using it, I’ll be on my third machine. I suppose I’ll just have to live with it and see how things go from here.<\/p>\n

Problems, problems…<\/p>\n

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I’ve had an horrendous last couple of weeks. All I’ve wanted to do is let my lawn robot tick over keeping my grass under control while I finished replacing the damaged screen in my Savannah but events have totally prevented me from doing this. Yes, the lawn robot has continued doing its job but problems … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24549"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24554,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24549\/revisions\/24554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}