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In the windows 3.11 days, when my sister got her brand new PC! It was the first computer that I ever got to use around the house (actually, I think it was the first computer period). As I played around with it, I was getting good with paintbrush (yes, 256 colors!) and solitaire and loved to go in the program manager looking for anything interesting. I was scarred to mess it up since I knew nothing at all about how software and hardware works and how the computer works at all. All I knew how is how to put it on (sometimes I would forget ho ). And I also learned a few msdos commands to get into a game but I had NO clue what I was doing. Now years go by, she takes that computer with here and then later on around 5 years I'd say we get this one, top of the line computer. I still didn’t know about computers and was scarred to do something I didn’t know what I was doing but as I got more comfortable, I started to experiment. I think what is the most funny is that I was terrified by ms-dos. To me, it was like being in a different world of using the computer and didn’t know what it could do to it. When I knew some basic commands such as a: and I think del and edit was one that freaked me out because of the blue but those came later one. The funniest thing was that I typed b: since I knew a: was the floppy, c: was the hdd and d: and e: where my cd-rom drives. So when I typed b:, it said: insert a disk for drive b:. and it stayed full screen. I was stuck with the terrifying msdos prompt on my screen. I did not know what to do. I was scarred that my parents walk in the room (it used to be in a room where my parents would always pass by and go in, there always walking around the house) so my only hope was to press the reset button to get out. I did, it ran scandisk and now I was freaking out even more since it says something about "errors on drive C". then, I got to windows, I did get caught by my dad since he walked in before it finished loading but I just told him it had freezed. Boy this is lon . It's hard to believe but because I've always been terrified by Ms-dos, I never did anything such as format c: or deltree/y c:\*.* (that could of been fun). But when I opened autoexec.bat, it din't take me long until I know how batch files work with dos and I seen people at school that knew more then me about dos type commands so I knew how to list files, delete, change directory etc. One thing that was not that long ago, I'd say about a year, is I selected all the files on my D drive which was a partition and I pressed DEL. for some reason windows had never prompted me and I lost all those files. I had about 300 megs of precious files! I find that recently, I did more destructive things then I did before I knew much about PC's.
oh, and I'll never forget the time I screwed up config.sys and it made windows freeze on the win98 logo. I went nuts over that one. I called our vendor, he thought me how to install windows and I did it. The next day, I felt so proud of myself! I had just installed Windows 98! I always laugh now and how I used to think of computers before. Just the fact of opening the case would make me freak out, until I learned that computer hardware is made so it can be fixed by anyone, it does now require special tools, then, it really didn’t take long for me to get used to it (that's whey I took back the crashed 486 that was originally my first computer). It was weird to restore that computer since I could find some files that I had done or changed long ago. Incredible for magnetic storage!
oh, and how about that time I connected the 486 motherboard wires on the wrong side, the motherboard was going ts ts ts ts ts ts ts and was acting like it was sizzling. Or that time not so long ago that I connected the 500mb hard drive to a 17v adapter to test it (since someone that has the habit of punching things, you now the rest.. ) and nothing happened. I think hooked it up the right way when I was done with the 486 and it smoked up. Thick, gray smoke came out. It was enough to get high off the fumes, of course, I only left if for about 5 seconds since it was starting to catch on fire., I really didn’t notice how long I made this post! Hope it was enjoyable if you read this far!
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