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Loading ...A Brief History
belchingmatt
A few years ago I was thrown in at the deep end when it came to computers. At home I had always been fortunate enough to have friends who would help out with hardware and software issues so I never had to. At work the company was so big and network so locked down that the chances of learning anything there were pretty slim.
In 2004 I emigrated to Sydney and that is when I actively became involved with all things PC. I could no longer run the machine up to a friends at the weekend, or call them at four in the morning for immediate advice, the geographical location prohibited all of my usual options.
From that point I had to start working things out for myself, and when I couldn’t do that I came to Dennis for advice. I quickly picked things up and without knowing it became the support guy for all of my new friends in Sydney, quite a turn-around when compared to where I came from.
One of the great things about Sydney are the great council clear ups. Every six months or so each local council would collect furniture and other discarded household goods from the roadside. Over a four week period I collected a couple of monitors, HDDs, optical drives, keyboard, RAM and then eventually case with a reasonably decent motherboard and CPU.
With some decent advice from readers here I got the system up and running to a reasonable level and then started overclocking. I got about a 50% increase from the CPU and although it was running stable it was a little too warm for a hot summer in Sydney. It was at that point that I thought of modding the case to improve the airflow, and it was going pretty well until an unexpected split from my wife left her with custody. 
I may have a chance to complete it the future.
I was fortunate enough to have a couple of friends when I started university (97) who knew a lot about building and running PC’s. Over the three years I learned enough to be self sufficient when it came to building and maintaining PC’s after I left. Thankfully things have gotten easier these days too, I don’t have to worry about driver disks and setting up sound card IRQ’s etc. People use to (and sometimes still do) complain about plug & play devices, but compared to the days of the ISA card 10/15 years ago, we’ve got it easy these day. There’s never been a better time to start building PC’s, and people should be encouraged to do so as it’s the best way to learn. The Dennis forums are always here for those who need help.