Module 8: Computers in My Life

Computers have been a major part of my life since I was very young. Although I haven’t done much intensive work as far as they’re concerned, I loved exploring the Mac as a very young child; playing games and navigating around to see what trouble I could cause. Moving from the Mac to a Windows 98’ machine didn’t seem to change much for me, I was too young to really see the difference between the two machines. One difference that I’ve found has still prevailed to this day is the ease at which I can get something on a Windows machine to bug out. I learned many of my computer skills from screwing up a system and having to go back into the system and fixing the problem, usually with the help of an online forum or several.

One of my favorite memories from when I was a child playing with a computer was when a friend of mine and I explored my elementary school’s computer system and found a work around that would allow us to install almost any computer game we wanted onto the system. After the school patched that up we found a way to play any game we wanted off of a flash drive, that way there was almost no trace that we’d ever been playing the games on the computers. Over the next years of my schooling I didn’t use computers very often unless I needed to because my parents restricted access to all electronics at my house, allowing us minimal time on them.

I picked up computers again just for fun part way through high school and did a lot of work on several, even becoming the techie in my group of friends, if a friend had a problem they always knew that I could sit down and look at it for a little bit  and find a fix. the problem with many of those fixes is that they could take a few hours to repair. One of these experiences was with a computer that wouldn’t even turn on, it was a joy. I began by flashing the BIOS to get the computer to at least get through the BIOS but would still not turn on. I tried multiple things for the next steps including spending hours formatting and wiping a flash drive, then attempting to create a bootable USB. (I was unsuccessful in doing but I did discover just recently that all I needed was a separated partition with a copy of a Windows 98’ kernel on it which would make it bootable to install Windows XP.) After being unsuccessful in my attempts to boot from a flash drive with the XP data on it, I turned to a more conventional means which was to simply borrow a USB disk drive and use a XP install disk I had laying around. This story was one of the most extensive software fixes I have ever done because not only did the computer have no ‘heartbeat’ but it was a netbook which do not have disk drives. As far as hardware, I have minor abilities to repair it and can replace any part as a whole. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to learn how to solder parts to physically repair a piece of hardware. 

Although I have a moderate background in being able to repair computer systems it was always cumbersome. I have found myself frustrated because of the shear numbers of repairs that never seemed to all be fixed. The last few years I decided I wanted to try something new so I began working towards buying myself a Macbook Air. I reached that goal just this last January and ever since receiving my Macbook I have decided that for my personal computer I will never look back to Windows. I can’t seem to screw this thing up no matter how much I mess with it. Any of the fixes I’ve had to do were in relation to a software update I received that caused certain compatibility issues with another application but these issues were easily and quickly fixed by myself and I have never run into the exact problem again. Now in the past with my Windows OS systems that would be a major problem because any new problem needed to be researched and fixed but with my Mac even though I don’t run into repeat problems the issues I run into are so infrequent that the research is enjoyable instead of a hassle. This has saved me hours of tinkering and allows me to stay on top of my school work when it tends to be computer based.