What got me into pc's? The Elder Scrolls - Oblivion. But there's a long story before that!
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The first pc my family bought was way back in 1992. All I remember was that it was a 286 and had a ''turbo'' button which didn't make any difference.
Having a pc in the house triggered my interest. The only pc I ever touched before was in 1998 when my best friend's dad bought her an Amiga and we used to take turns playing on it. The games were on cassette tapes, and we used to wait 30 minutes for a game to load before playing.
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Anyway I was very interested in our first 286. It didn't even have a mouse, and we never got the joystick to work, but it had enormous 5ÂĽ-inch disks and we didn't need to wait 30 minutes before playing a game.
My mom had a ''back to the future'' relationship with this pc - she used to type in questions like we normally type on Google today, expecting the machine to answer and then get disappointed when she got a ''<Dir> not found'' error. It never told her the weather or gave her any solution to whatever she typed, and at the end she gave up.
Whenever my dad had a problem it was always me who solved it. They were mostly command prompt errors - DOS is like that - he'd forget where something was and I'd go searching the directories for him and show him what to type to get to it
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However that computer used to give a lot of trouble and dad was constantly taking it to the seller. One day when the warranty was up and the computer wouldn't start he decided to open the case, and he found pencil batteries (those disposable ones!) connected very amateurishly to something. Now my dad might not have known anything about computers but he's a qualified radio technician and could easily recognize whether something was factory-made or an attempted botched fix.
From then onwards my dad always bought computers with the family money (obviously not from the same shop!), and they were for all the family and for my studies. Certainly not gaming pc's. The last one we had (some Pentium 4 with an MX440 graphics card) used to stagger a lot while playing The Sims 2. Basically I only played Sims games. At that time still I knew zilch about hardware. If it beeped or anything, I'd just put it in the car and take it to the shop! I never even opened up a case to clean inside!
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One fine day I was playing Sims 2 on this Pentium 4, which had been going strongly for quite some years, and this time it was blissfully silent.
Remember I had never opened the case - way back then they used to be sealed and if you broke the seal you void the warranty. I never imagined that dirt might accumulate inside... since the seller was fine with me not opening it for 2 whole years for warranty why should I have bothered for the years to come? I only imagined it's safer to keep it sealed!
Anyway this time I noticed that the pc had suddenly become incredibly silent. Which was weird considering that it had become so noisy that I suspected that some thousand bees had set up home inside.
Realizing that the sudden disappearance of those thousand bees was too good to be true, I cautiously started examining the case. Externally. With a flash light.
That was when I saw this fan at the back, which was stationary (It was the PSU fan but I had no clue). My only thought was that since this thing is powered up then that thing (a.k.a. fan) should be powered up as well. So I took out my tool-kit... erm.... my thin ball-point pen and kicked one of the blades. Sure enough the fan started turning and my 1000 bees were back humming in full vengeance.
I spent months doing this 'trick' to get the PSU fan running. Then one day it refused to run any more and the smell wasn't very nice especially after Sims 2. So I switched everything off, placed the tower on its side, and for my first time in history I got a screw-driver and opened the tower.
Believe me I wish I took a photo. There was fluff and cobwebs everywhere. There were even live spiders and dead moths inside. Everything looked very sticky (I used to smoke indoors while playing). It was disgusting. I didn't touch any of ''it'' but realized that the fan was in another compartment I needed to dismantle! I still had no idea what it was or its function. Anyway I unscrewed it and gently eased it out of the tower, taking a lot of care that the rest of the wiring was still attached since there was no way I could wire that thing up again. I opened the PSU and dismantled the fan. The following day I went to the pc store, gunky sticky yellow fan in hand, asking them to ''give me a fan like this''. With the new fan I went happily home, replaced it and put everything back in place, blew with my mouth on everything inside the tower to try to get as much gunk out of the case (had no clue I could use compressed air!) and my pc was back working as good as new. Ran fine for a couple more years, and to my relief, without the 1000 bees inside.
It was only much later that I learnt that I had been working on the PSU, and that it could have been quite dangerous...
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Fast-forward to 2006 and I saw a youtube video showing Oblivion. There was no way my ancient still-cobwebby Pentium with MX440 and heaven knows which other sticky components could run those awesome graphics, bee-hive or not.
I also quit smoking indoors, not for my sake, not for my husband's sake and neither for my kids' sake because none had been born yet. I quit smoking indoors for my beloved computer's sake.
So I decided to get my own gaming pc, with my own money. This was some months before I registered on TPU. I went to one of the best local shops who suggested that they build a custom one for me.
Anyway, this seller suggested an E4300, Asus P5B, 2GB of generic RAM, some PSU, and an 8600GT inside the cheapest case possible. He quoted the total at €1,400 which was a phenomenal sum for me at the time so I didn't commit myself. I researched, found benchmarks, and thought wow this is a monster (compared to the gunky pentium!)
Since he had given me a breakdown for each part, and was charging only like €25 for assembly and installation, I decided to check how much it would cost for me to buy the same parts online. Imagine my surprise when I ended with slightly more than €600, Windows included and with a nice case with large fans and blue lights everywhere
rather than the cheap office-type one I was offered!
That was when I started searching the net, spending hours reading on how to build pc's and found TPU. I didn't register because I felt embarrassed posting anything. Everybody here were building their own pc's, overclocking them etc and I felt a total idiot...
But this forum gave me the courage - so many people were doing it, why couldn't I?
Hence I bit the bullet and bought the parts. Spent a week or so staring at them, strewn on a table. Finally bit by bit I assembled the computer. And by golly it worked at the first try. I gamed on it for some weeks, while still reading TPU. I remember reading a good thread on overclocking the E4300, and I got it to 3Ghz without any glitches. That was the moment when I felt comfortable enough to register.
Oblivion ran fine but frequently it went below 30fps so I was disappointed a bit hence 2 or 3 months later I did away with the 8600GT and got an 8800GT and added 2GB more RAM which made the game run perfectly just the way it should.
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My main job isn't related to computers at all, I never even studied IT, but pc's are my best hobby. I've assembled over 10 pc's for free for family and friends, and also a couple for work. Software and virus removals? I've lost the count.
I was always cautious on overclocking though, and never attempted it unless the person really needed it to get the most out of old hardware or specifically asked for it.
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My next challenge is laptops. My first experience was not great. I had bought a Clevo laptop with a Q9400 and two 8800GTX in 2009 and after the warranty expired one card started frying up after the other. I bought some 3 cards in total, barely getting the chance to run them in SLi as intended, replacing one after the other myself and when finally the last card quit working I just gave up on it.
My only success on laptops so far was dismantling my mom's to replace a dead HDD. She's become quite proficient now in computer use, Microsoft Office, our accounting software at work. Oh and now there's google so she can ask anything without getting a ''<Dir> not found'' error.