My obsession with IT came about at a tender age of 10. When I was given an Intel 80286 personal computer.
It all started with video games actually but to get them running I had to learn commands for the MS-DOS operating system (OS). Not to mention, at that age, I didn’t have the financial ability to buy the latest hardware to boost my video gaming obsession experience. So I had to learn how to tweak and coax the maximum out of the 1MB RAM and a 6MHz processor not to mention the odd system crash which required me to wipe the 40MB hard disk drive (HDD) and reinstall the OS over again.
Those experiences gave me the computer skills and also the bragging rights amongst my peers with my insanely efficient 80286 computer that out-performed some 80386 machines and once in a while a low end 80486 when it came to video games.
A couple years on… after frying the computer mainboard during an unfortunate upgrading attempt, I managed to weasel a new machine from my dad. This was at the advent of broadband internet, circa 1997, in Singapore. With Singtel Magix, and a then blistering 512kbps bandwidth, I was all over the internet scouring for all the new and experimental things that I could possibly get my hands on. It was at this time when the now almost defunct Geocities was widely used as a means for people to put themselves on the web with personalised homepages. This, of course upped your street cred in secondary school, when you go to the school computer lab and show off your online presence there.
10 years on, I’ve still not kicked the habit of experimenting with computers and recently I got my hands on distros of Linux and the Release Candidate for Windows 7. I will be testing these over the next few weeks and I will come up with reviews on both. Looking at the reviews so far for Windows 7 it all looks rather promising. Let’s see about that….!