What can I say today

I'm not exactly a prolific blogger, but what the hell! Here I am again.

After successfully building my own PC, I've now built one for my mate. It gives me a great feeling of satisfaction to be able to do this. Only four years ago I was terrified to even open my PC up.

We now have 3 PC's and a laptop in the house. I've just to add a card to one of the PC's to have them all connected to an ad-hoc wireless network. I only use the 802.11b standard which is quite fast enough to give my wife, daughter and myself access to the internet, even with the broadband connection.

I can remember saying to a work colleague around 12 years ago that if I got through life having never touched a computer I'd be very happy. However, no employer nowadays can afford to fall behind in the great technology developments, and mine was no exception.
I had to reluctantly accept that I had to join the technical revolution. At first it was no fun with our big mainframe computer and our bespoke software. No fun to be had there! Then Microsoft brought out Windows 3.1 and it was all change. Personal PC's on every desk and the education began. Before I retired (early) I also had experience of Win95 and Win NT 4, by which time we'd bought our first family PC driven by an Intel 166MMX, with a 33.6k modem, 32Mb RAM, a 1.5GB hard drive and Win95. WOW! Oh, almost forgot the 2Mb graphics card.

That was back in 1997, and the PC is still going strong in a friends house where the grandchildren use it.

The 'small' PC in the house is now driven by a PIII 600mhz (Win98SE). The laptop has WinME (not a personal favourite of mine, but it's my wife's). My daughter inhereted my old PC with WinXP Home. My own one, which I built earlier this year has an AMD AthlonXP 2500+ with Barton core, 2 HD's totaling 220GB's, 512MB DDR RAM (2x256MB TwinX Corsair Memory PC3200) and a 128MB graphics card (I'm not a gamer) and WinXP Home SP1.

My knowledge of computers, although still far from extensive, has been gleaned mostly from various PC magazines, the internet and various books bought over the years. Magazines are a great source of information, if they use plain english. I personally subscribe to Computer@tive, Microsoft Windows XP-The official magazine and Personal Computer World. I've only recently started with the lastmentioned one, so have yet to form an opinion on it, but I highly recommend the first two.

You've no doubt guessed that I've been well and truly bitten by the computer bug.

The learning has been done slowly over a number of years and it's an absorbing hobby with much still to learn and exiting times ahead. It keeps what brain cells I still have reasonably active.

If anyone reads this, and they are at the beginning of the adventure, then I would urge them to stick at it. It's probably one of the few areas where I can honestly say I know more about it than my 17 year old daughter does. She gives me the impression, at times, that she knows more about everything else in life. Only joking, she's a wonderful kid and I love her to bits.

OK, that's it for today.

Bye for now!