Matrix Files
Where You Have Taken The Red Pill

Computers

I got involved with computers sometime in 1987 when I used a friends Commodore 64. I hated it.

I remember, having forgotten the simple password to access it, sitting there most of the night trying to get in to write my poems into the word processing program. That one experience put me off them for 10 years.

My thinking was that if the computer was yours and had no important stuff on it, why would a password be needed to use it? I had, and still have, a very dim view of those who make and program these machines. Passwords are useless anyway and can be quite a liability.

For example, just a few days ago (28th August 2017) I had a friend call me up because he needed help in accessing a laptop because his girlfriend had forgotten the password to it. After an hour of trying to help nothing could be done. Eventually I told him to take the hard drive out and access it via an external hard drive USB caddy. He was able to do that but didn't find what he was looking for.

So you see, passwords on computers are stupid things to have, because they can be bypassed easily by doing what I told my friend to do, unless you have information on the computer that is highly sensitive. If that is the case then one should have an external hard drive where these items are kept which you then access when you need to. You can do this remotely too (where you are in another part of the world and your external hard drive is at home) as there are now devices that easily allow you to do this. These are called NAS devices – Network Attached Storage devices. They plug in to your internet router which has been supplied to you by your internet provider (or, as is more likely the case, into the router that is plugged into the internet service provided router – your internet provider supplies a basic internet modem [also called a router] and you plug in a router of your choice that provides the network for your home – see computer lingo for more about the nomenclature of computing).

Passwords are holdovers from the days when most computers were used by academia and the ones that were in use were Unix machines which had passwords as a default option as they were normally used by more than one person. Now, even run of the mill laptops and desktops invariably have passwords.

I seem to have been sidetracked by this password nonsense which is surprising. I didn't realize I was so against them.

Anyway, I got my first computer, a used 486DX4-100 laptop with Windows 3.11, 4MB of RAM(!), and a 500MB hard drive(!!), from Watford Electronics in the UK in 1997. I got it after having a meeting with my bank manager to get a large loan. It was part of a business plan I had presented to him.

I soon discovered that my laptop had problems, which I was unaware of at the time of purchase. I found out about it when it crashed one day. I then spent a few hours sitting at my desk turning the bloody thing on and off. It worked sometimes when doing this. I eventually figured out that the CPU had overheated. When this happened it crashed and was not able to be turned on until the CPU had cooled down.

I also had a friend whom I was able to call and who helped me through doing some diagnostics on the machine after I got it running again.

So that is how I ended up being able to fix computers – by having my own problems and having help from a friend in solving them.

Since then I have learnt a lot more about computers and have also been dismayed to see how those who know nothing about them regularly get taken advantage of by these large computer companies and those who work in the industry.

So the biggest reason for having this section on my site is for anyone to get the background info to computing that you won't get most anywhere else and to get to understand the nomenclature so that you are less easily taken advantage of.

I also give you a section where you can configure your machine to run Windows XP easily so that it will not give you problems and hassle you with messages to 'upgrade' (which is what some websites now do when you visit them – through the 'this browser is no longer supported' message that appears).

I have also made public a formerly hidden link to a whole heap of programs that I have uploaded for my own use, and now yours, that I have come across over the years. You can find that link here or it is the Programs/App DB link to the left.

I hope that you find this section of benefit.


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