We've got to admire the trouble to which the people at Bike-Fax have gone to promote their new book/CD-ROM route guides. This box contains all we need for "an office environment experience of the best mountain biking trails in Snowdonia" - the book, the CD, a bottle of Snowdon mineral water and a small pot of Welsh mud, plus instructions on how best to spread the mud and water around for the full effect. Fun with marketing aside, the Snowdonia guide looks good. It's the work of Sue Savege, Dafydd Davis and Paul Barbier. Dafydd built a healthy proportion of the trails in North Wales, but a quick riffle through the pages shows that the book's got loads of "traditional" rides too. And it's bilingual. The book's £16.95, the CD's £9.50 and Bike-Fax even sells waterproof paper to print the maps on to. Find out more at www.bike-fax.com.

Also new in the world of guidebooks is the second title from Vertebrate Graphics. We very much liked its first book - Dark Peak Mountain Biking - and by the looks of things South West Mountain Biking looks to continue the quality trend. The book's written by veteran guidebook author Nick Cotton and covers Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Quantocks and the Mendips. Which is pretty much our patch, so we'll be checking them out shortly. South West Mountain Biking is £14.95 - visit www.v-graphics.co.uk for more details.

We've already told you about Intense Tire Systems's CC 2.25in tyre - here's another one from the range, the System 2. There's also the System 1, which is similar but with a slightly more spaced-out tread. Both are 2in tyres, but the 1 is intended for soft-to-intermediate conditions and the 2 is intended for intermediate-to-hard. Apparently people are having reasonable success using the slightly knobblier 1 on the front and the fast-rolling 2 on the back, so we'll give that a whirl first. Both tyres are around 560g and £27 - more from Jungle Products.