BSOD

Windows users are familiar with BSOD, you know, blue screen of death. Well, maybe not some of the younger ones. To be honest, I haven't seen one in at least a couple of years, and since I babysit about thirty computers (or is it the users? I'm never sure) I am beginning to believe Microsoft may be getting the bugs out, finally.

Garmin, on the other hand... I'll call this the Blank Screen of Death. Sunday I went out for a 52 mile ride, it took about 3 hours, and during that time my 305 shut it's self off no less than 10 times. It would power up again, and actually kept track of the mileage even though all the other data only got recorded from the last restart. As far as mileage and time, I always take my Cateye Astral 8 along with the display set to cadence, so all the ride data is there as well as on the Garmin, except heartrate and elevation. When I got home I Googled the problem - I'd Bing it, but Google is so ingrained - and found it's not all that uncommon. The most widely reported problem seems to be a design flaw that causes the battery contacts to fatigue and momentarily disconnect the battery from the circuit board. The fatigue is caused by vibration. Since my Garmin is still under warranty, I immediately emailed their customer support. About lunch time on Monday I had a response. Tech support suggested I perform a Master Reset. This consists of holding down the power and mode button until the unit asks if you want to clear all data, to which you answer yes. So, I did. I didn't think it would work, but it seems to have. I rode 32 miles on Tuesday in an hour and fifty minutes and the unit did not shut down at all. I don't even know what data it cleared, either because everything is still in it.

Can't really complain, they responded quickly with a solution that seems to have worked, and now I know what to do next time.