MarkS02

I'm not a foremost expert in PCs and never the last word but I've learned a thing or two along the way with Lesson #1 being, "There's always a workaround." #2 is when solving a problem, "Never change more than one variable at a time."

Persistence and patience are good lessons for all of life.

I'm just an old computer geek building my own machines since '89. A recovering upgrade junkie who'd spend Saturdays at the local CompUSA temple and weekend installing the latest .01 patch or hardware driver and making it work in Win 3.11. Or long into the night figuring out the perfect TSR load order in the boot.sys or a .bat file to max out that first 620K of my enviable 4MB of RAM to run all the features of the latest flight sim (Falcon 3.0!).

The guy whose gaming buddies thought was a genius when he learned how to load a 2mb RAMDrive in DOS for games to run in. Who gladly spent $430 for his first high-end video card- the ATI Graphics Ultra Pro running at a blistering 10mhz with a whopping 4mb of VRAM and $1000 for his first big HDD- the Fujitsu 2-bay, 5-platter 720mb monster with all the space he'd ever need. The mysterious stranger and self-taught, would-be graphic artist who in 1993 startled astonished savants at a local graphics/print shop when he showed up with a Syquest disk to rip 4-color separations done in CorelDraw 3.0 on a PC like an alien from a distant galaxy just arrived on Planet MAC to rattle their assumptions.

Now? I go for stability, reliability and proven technology. Stayed with Win XP until about 2012 or so and then Win7 until about 2018. Just now doing a build to replace my 12 year old Core2 Quad Q9650 which runs perfectly fine except for the moderate level video and audio editing I do. The old Core2 will continue to do light duty work and internet duties in the family room for a couple more years to come. I just want these infernal machines to run and do what I want them to do, now.

Other than that, I play the drums in my own band in S. FL, am a lifelong insurance agent and adviser married to the girl I met in '78 with whom I have six children and all around nice guy.