sweetmeow's got me thinking on my computer experience
While I've been doing this re-installation thing, I've been thinking on my love of computers.
I'm a computer geek. I know what I'm doing, most of the time. I customize, format, partition, install, experiment, tweak, and get excited about this collection of wires, plastic and silicon chips in a way a lot of people don't. They don't bother, or they don't dare, or they don't have time.
There's nothing wrong with getting a pre-built machine, and calling in tech support to solve problems. That's what they're for. That's what's sufficient for most people, and that's what they're happy with. I just happen to be the kind of person who likes to know as much as possible, and do as much as possible with what I know.
Up until a year and a half ago, I just used my work computer, and used it for only what was necessary. I didn't have one at home, and I really didn't care. Then one day in November, Dave (the asshole who lived with me) came home with some old computer parts and wanted to put them together, and when he couldn't figure out how they worked he instructed (read: ordered) me to find out what to do to make them run. So you could say that it's all because of him.
He was pretty good with the hardware side of things, but as he was practically illiterate, depended on me to take care of software. So I started investigating. I still had no personal drive to learn any of this stuff. I'd long held the view that computers were extremely complicated and expensive, and I'd never hope to learn anything worth using about them, so I never tried. But once Dave got his mind set on something, he wanted it done, and his temper pretty much gave me no choice but to find out what I could do to make him shut up.
It was right around that time that I discovered VirtualDr Computer Forums, a resource that has helped me more than anything I can think of. I clearly remember not even knowing the meaning of "slave" and "master," and asking questions that I would now consider very basic, yet the people there were very helpful and got me the answers I needed. When I brought the solutions home and they worked, my interest was piqued, and I started feeling that this awesome realm that I'd shied away from could, in fact, be accessible to me after all.
It wasn't long before I was voraciously reading anything I could get my hands on, and I particularly remember reading about how to partition a drive and thinking, "I could do this!" It was at that point that I started fiddling with that decrepit hunk of metal he'd dug out of a trash heap as much for my own benefit as for his.
Within a month, I'd mastered basic DOS commands, memorized diagrams of the inside of a hard drive, skimmed the history of file system evolution, and learned the difference between a motherboard and a processor. I learned the capacity of a kilobyte, a megabyte, and a gigabyte. I could use FDisk to format, partition, wipe a drive clean and start all over again; when that wasn't sufficient, I learned about the free drive utilities manufacturers provide for their products, and made much use of those. We got our hands on Windows 3.11 and fiddled around with that for awhile, then dug up an old copy of Windows 95, which gave me even more to play with. But it wasn't enough for him; he had to keep on making it better, while I was racing to keep up. We tried installing my work copy of XP on a 1GB hard drive, only to learn that we needed vastly more space...so one day he brought home an 80GB hard drive, and that was that. Then I had to figure out how to make the BIOS recognize the drive, which involved updating the chip, and so on and so forth...
All this time that I was learning by leaps and bounds, he would insist that he knew more than me: "64 MB of RAM is plenty!" "The CPU is what you call the whole machine, not that little spinny-thing!" "Because I said so, idiot!" "You're doing it wrong!" And so on and so forth.
By Christmas, I'd installed Windows XP 5 times in 2 weeks, and really got the hang of customizing it quickly, making it do what I wanted (and what he wanted). We bought ourselves a mid-range Logitech digital/web camera (with what money, I have no idea) and he finally left me alone. (Ironically, now that I'd gotten interested and really wanted to actually use the computer we'd built, he wouldn't let me.)
Just before New Year's, I got him (finally!) out of my life. Sometime early in January, I realized that there were a lot of things I could do with him gone that I hadn't wanted to before. Back when I first started having fun with the limited supplies he brought home, I'd thought of getting a personal computer loan through work, but had really been leery for fear he would take the "new toy" over as his and I'd be left paying the bill. Now, with no worry of that happening, I got approval for the loan and began putting together a draft of my ideal machine, researching to find the best parts for me and where to get them.
I wanted to build it from scratch, rather than getting an HP or a Dell or something, because I wanted something that I was in control of from the get-go, that didn't come with a ton of software I didn't want or need, and that I could fix easily, myself, if something went wrong, without worrying about voiding the warranty. The guys at the shop I went to were really nice about finding me the parts I needed, and making sure they were adequate for what I wanted to do with them. The only mistake I'd made, when I came into the store with my list of specifics, was to ask for an Intel-based motherboard to go with my AMD processor. They got me a good price, and I couldn't wait to go home and set it up.
Then I promptly fried the motherboard.
When I brought it back to the shop, they were shocked by my mistake ~ having assumed I'd done it before, they hadn't bothered to tell me about the need for spacers between the motherboard and the chassis. They replaced it for free, against my protests to the contrary.
Since then, I've just been playing, experimenting, making mistakes, and fixing them. I spend a lot of time researching before doing something new, backing up files to the nth degree, and being prepared to restore if things don't go right. There are things I WON'T touch, like the registry and certain network settings, and I've installed some programs that probably hurt more than they benefit. A year ago today, after I moved and hooked it up to the internet for the first time, I caught a debilitating worm within an hour of being online ~ I hadn't gotten around to installing antivirus before the cable guy showed up. A routine driver update once screwed up my graphics settings beyond recognition; another time, the newest version of ZoneAlarm firewall quite literally killed my internet connection altogether (which required a re-installation of Windows as well).
And there are other things. It's a learning process, just like anything else.
I'm a computer geek. I know what I'm doing, most of the time. I customize, format, partition, install, experiment, tweak, and get excited about this collection of wires, plastic and silicon chips in a way a lot of people don't. They don't bother, or they don't dare, or they don't have time.
There's nothing wrong with getting a pre-built machine, and calling in tech support to solve problems. That's what they're for. That's what's sufficient for most people, and that's what they're happy with. I just happen to be the kind of person who likes to know as much as possible, and do as much as possible with what I know.
Up until a year and a half ago, I just used my work computer, and used it for only what was necessary. I didn't have one at home, and I really didn't care. Then one day in November, Dave (the asshole who lived with me) came home with some old computer parts and wanted to put them together, and when he couldn't figure out how they worked he instructed (read: ordered) me to find out what to do to make them run. So you could say that it's all because of him.
He was pretty good with the hardware side of things, but as he was practically illiterate, depended on me to take care of software. So I started investigating. I still had no personal drive to learn any of this stuff. I'd long held the view that computers were extremely complicated and expensive, and I'd never hope to learn anything worth using about them, so I never tried. But once Dave got his mind set on something, he wanted it done, and his temper pretty much gave me no choice but to find out what I could do to make him shut up.
It was right around that time that I discovered VirtualDr Computer Forums, a resource that has helped me more than anything I can think of. I clearly remember not even knowing the meaning of "slave" and "master," and asking questions that I would now consider very basic, yet the people there were very helpful and got me the answers I needed. When I brought the solutions home and they worked, my interest was piqued, and I started feeling that this awesome realm that I'd shied away from could, in fact, be accessible to me after all.
It wasn't long before I was voraciously reading anything I could get my hands on, and I particularly remember reading about how to partition a drive and thinking, "I could do this!" It was at that point that I started fiddling with that decrepit hunk of metal he'd dug out of a trash heap as much for my own benefit as for his.
Within a month, I'd mastered basic DOS commands, memorized diagrams of the inside of a hard drive, skimmed the history of file system evolution, and learned the difference between a motherboard and a processor. I learned the capacity of a kilobyte, a megabyte, and a gigabyte. I could use FDisk to format, partition, wipe a drive clean and start all over again; when that wasn't sufficient, I learned about the free drive utilities manufacturers provide for their products, and made much use of those. We got our hands on Windows 3.11 and fiddled around with that for awhile, then dug up an old copy of Windows 95, which gave me even more to play with. But it wasn't enough for him; he had to keep on making it better, while I was racing to keep up. We tried installing my work copy of XP on a 1GB hard drive, only to learn that we needed vastly more space...so one day he brought home an 80GB hard drive, and that was that. Then I had to figure out how to make the BIOS recognize the drive, which involved updating the chip, and so on and so forth...
All this time that I was learning by leaps and bounds, he would insist that he knew more than me: "64 MB of RAM is plenty!" "The CPU is what you call the whole machine, not that little spinny-thing!" "Because I said so, idiot!" "You're doing it wrong!" And so on and so forth.
By Christmas, I'd installed Windows XP 5 times in 2 weeks, and really got the hang of customizing it quickly, making it do what I wanted (and what he wanted). We bought ourselves a mid-range Logitech digital/web camera (with what money, I have no idea) and he finally left me alone. (Ironically, now that I'd gotten interested and really wanted to actually use the computer we'd built, he wouldn't let me.)
Just before New Year's, I got him (finally!) out of my life. Sometime early in January, I realized that there were a lot of things I could do with him gone that I hadn't wanted to before. Back when I first started having fun with the limited supplies he brought home, I'd thought of getting a personal computer loan through work, but had really been leery for fear he would take the "new toy" over as his and I'd be left paying the bill. Now, with no worry of that happening, I got approval for the loan and began putting together a draft of my ideal machine, researching to find the best parts for me and where to get them.
I wanted to build it from scratch, rather than getting an HP or a Dell or something, because I wanted something that I was in control of from the get-go, that didn't come with a ton of software I didn't want or need, and that I could fix easily, myself, if something went wrong, without worrying about voiding the warranty. The guys at the shop I went to were really nice about finding me the parts I needed, and making sure they were adequate for what I wanted to do with them. The only mistake I'd made, when I came into the store with my list of specifics, was to ask for an Intel-based motherboard to go with my AMD processor. They got me a good price, and I couldn't wait to go home and set it up.
Then I promptly fried the motherboard.
When I brought it back to the shop, they were shocked by my mistake ~ having assumed I'd done it before, they hadn't bothered to tell me about the need for spacers between the motherboard and the chassis. They replaced it for free, against my protests to the contrary.
Since then, I've just been playing, experimenting, making mistakes, and fixing them. I spend a lot of time researching before doing something new, backing up files to the nth degree, and being prepared to restore if things don't go right. There are things I WON'T touch, like the registry and certain network settings, and I've installed some programs that probably hurt more than they benefit. A year ago today, after I moved and hooked it up to the internet for the first time, I caught a debilitating worm within an hour of being online ~ I hadn't gotten around to installing antivirus before the cable guy showed up. A routine driver update once screwed up my graphics settings beyond recognition; another time, the newest version of ZoneAlarm firewall quite literally killed my internet connection altogether (which required a re-installation of Windows as well).
And there are other things. It's a learning process, just like anything else.