power supply issues, a melted gpu, what lead me to become bad at using computers, and how i got slightly better.

I was not bad with computers in grade school or middleschool, and even did maintenance on them, but i suppose i never really took them apart or did any programming. But maybe i did take them apart, because I kind of remember that, but at least by college I had forgotten. I remembered it much later I suppose. I think in 7th grade, i was particularly affected by a migraine headache, and I feel like before that I was extremely skilled with the computers I had, especially for my age, I know I was beating tie figher, doom, xcom, etc on my dos pc and I read a couple books about windows 95 all the way through, and i was even finding early viruses and fixing computers a bit. I even knew dos pretty well and commonly used both early dial up internet with prodigy or to play age of empires 1 or doom 2. But something happened and I kind of lost those memories for a while.

I was more focused on games, psychology, history, etc. in high school and I had a typing teacher, who did successfully teach me how to type faster, in 10th grade. I thought I could just become a typing teacher like him, he went to UW-Whitewater. It was at that point that I decided to get a double major in business and education, a plan i completely forgot about and only had part of by the end of my freshman year in college due to another migraine that I had in maybe january of 2002. Meaning that during the next 4 years I had completely lost my original plan.

At one point my dad convinced me not to major in business, and since I didn't remember why i thought i wanted to do it anyway, I just dropped that and went with education only. A degree I really don't know what to do with and probably shouldn't try to use with all my migraines and other health problems and other differences between myself and other people, I think my migraines are not just migraines but an unknown, unrecognized, neurogolical disability. Anyway, no one cares, but migraines are no fun is the point of that i guess.

I didn't see computers and programming as an actual subject of study and not just a way to get video games to work or a cool thing have in a base and/or basement until maybe my junior year of college, the first two years of college somehow didn't convince me either. So how did i end up going back to school and studying web development and eventually getting to the still not good enough but definitely better than the average person level i'm at now?

This particular pc was made by my whitewater roommate, who was also the most skilled programmer I have ever met, and because i'm a big fan of super mario kart, i've met lots of them. He moved to minnesota where he lived happily ever after. i never talked to him again for many reasons. I think he became a completely normal person, and that's really what he was working towards, and for him it worked. Anyway he moved to Minnesota and never looked back and I'm happy he did. I think the living in another state and maybe the fact that i've never liked facebook are the main reasons.

But anyway I was so bad at computers by late 2005 that I was giving him money to build one for me, something that should never have been necessary. and I was going really cheap, so he was forced to go cheap too, and he chose to go cheap on the power supply. I did not care one bit at the time, but obviously the power supply is pretty important. So 2 years later in 2008, after I had nearly gone pro in rise of legends, not league of legends unfortunately, but rise of legends, its processor started to get kind of melty. It finally crashed the first time that I tried to play supreme commander, went to the bsod. I asked togos to fix it and at the time he couldn't, though i'm sure he could now, but now he wouldn't, and I wouldn't want him to because any work on this pc including this backstory i'm writing is a huge waste of time for any human at this point. The last time it would have made any sense to fix it was around 2009.

Anyway, maybe I should try getting a new processor from the time, that's probably the best bet. If I replace the processor is it still the same computer?, actually I think the answer is no. To me the processor and motherboard are the two unchangable parts of a computer, and when you change one of those it becomes a new computer and the old one is gone. (i wrote this a while ago, maybe 2019, and i've changed my mind, i now think you can change as much as you want as of september 2023)

At that time in 2009 neither of us could figure out what was wrong with it. So I went to the swap and for a while used a big black ibm pc, this one(add picture), but supreme commander and some other games ended up being too much for it, it had a ram limit of 768mb, and its hard drive soon failed, leading to a kind of amazing repair of that old ibm too. During this time I was avoiding getting a good new pc because I did know enough to not feel like getting windows vista, kind of like recently with windows 11. My other friend, who 2-6 years later i think decided he didn't like me after we went on a horrible camping trip, which is a pretty good reason to turn against me, was showing me some html at the time, then my first call center went out of business and offered to pay for me to go back to school. but then they didn't pay for it, so now i want loan forgiveness because they lied, student loans are a scam, etc., but that's another story.

So I went to matc and almost chose respiratory therapy (as of september 2023 i now see i should have chosen radiology and dogecoin) but decided to study html, and javascript, and xml, and java because i had seen my ex roommates and several people successfully do a lot of java stuff and it was part of the web analyst/programmer cirriculum, and I had been spending a lot of time around computers for my entire life, so i thought even if I didn't get a job, it would still be useful, which maybe it is, computers are pretty useful.

It has been tiny bit useful, at least i can take care of all the projects I've listed on this website, and make/modify old school html websites like this one now. Having superior to most people technical skills is also helpful in most of the low paying customer service jobs i've had, including the one i have now. Before MATC started in fall 2009, I had that sort of old at the time ibm pc which only had a 1gb hard drive and would die of hard drive failure 2 years later in 2011. I also had the destroyed ibm swap pc with the bad hard drive, and this unrepairable 2005 pc with the partially melted cpu, my 1995 amdk6, and a dying dell dimension 2200.(one of the few pcs i have taken to get recycled, because of the sharp things in the case, etc.)

After going to some coffee shops I became kind of jealous of all of the smart looking, caffinated people who had new ASUS netbooks lol. (this is when i decided i liked asus, it was 2009, i just as of 9/2023 made my last gigantic asus windows pc, it should last a while, i might try to get away from asus and windows in the future, my next laptop hopefully being a system76, framework, or starfighter laptop, maybe with zorin, pop os, or linux mint. this will also be when i will finally make the jump to 1440p, my new pc has 3 280hz 1080p 24.5 inch monitors, i went for this because i wanted 3 monitors and i think all graphics cards, even the 4090 are struggling to run at 1440p, maybe this will be 2026, maybe it will have a gtx 6000 series that will be capable of 1440p without lighting on fire, my 4070 will run cool and efficient with 3 1080p monitors and will probably never stop working) I also noticed that windows vista was gone, and saw them using the greatest windows of all time, windows 7.

Partially because of the lessons the attempts at repairing the 2005 pc had taught me, I knew by now to look up specs. I had learned about dual core and quad core processors, I knew I needed a quad core (at least a hyperthreaded quad core). I wanted something cheap but more powerful than anything that most people with those eee pcs had.

I picked the biggest, most monstrous looking pc at best buy. The Asus - Essentio core i5. It was only $600, it could run crysis, and thinking that my bankrupt call center was going to pay for it, i bought it immediately.

I couldn't have been more right, about the computer at least, it's still amazing 13 years later. It hasn't really ever failed. It is a little slower now that i'm used to ssds though. It's case is pretty spacious, and I was able to put very large passive cooling heat sinks inside of it a few years later. I was able to use a very large heat sink for the processor and put in a very large passive gtx 750. I'm still going to upgrade its hard drive. The fact that it still has windows 7 only makes it better today.

Anyway, in late 2009, after trying to fix the 2005 pc several dozen times, i had realized its problems had come from the 400 watt power supply not being enough. So I had best buy install a bigger power supply in the new core i5 than it needed, I think a 750 watt, though for the purpose of this website i'll check soon. I took its old one which is/was 600 watts and put it in the broken pc. Later I also got a gt 730 video card which I now know is awful, but it was actually a little better than the expensive video card from 2005 and ran a lot cooler. For a while i was able to use it as a web server and in one school project in 2010, i had it hooked up to a dmz router and it was on its own dns, and it was running a school project where we made our own basic search engine. I wanted to make a better web server and so i bought a mini itx pc and took it down, partially because i knew it could struggle to stay on for a long time without overheating. It sat there for a couple of years while i tried to learn android development, had shoulder surgery, and unfortunately got recruited to a call center called west because I was running out of money, I wanted to escape a part time job with qti, and i only thought it would be a temporary thing.

In 2015, i installed several operating systems including a classic version of xp and several versions of linux on it, it then worked for a while, and i thought it was fine but i of course didn't use it very much because by then i had both my new computer and my lenovo b15? laptop going. It eventually had hard drive failure. I have a new hard drive in there, I forget what kind but i'm going to check, I also have haiku os working on it right now, but it can't get the screen size right so i'm thinking of doing two things with it, replacing the processor and installing antix.(i have not been able to check on it at all in 2023 because of the overwhelming nature of the floor painting project). The core i5 from best buy, my favorite computer of all time, still works well today, and to prevent its hard drive from failing i'm planning to clone it on to an ssd using macrium reflect. The school assignments i was able to do on it and games i was able to play on it, made it possible for me to become just a little bit more of a technical person than i was, and that allowed me to make this site and attempt to do all of these projects.