Hi
Just a few words about my credentials....
Pretty much none!
I'm not a computer person in the sense that I build, repair or have vast knowledge of the internal parts.
I can add parts to my computer, (I recently put in a SSD for my new Windows 10 retail installation) and I can swap out misc. parts if they are bad.
I started with Windows 3.1 and Dos, which you still needed to use with the early Windows.
I'm a graphic designer by profession, and do to circumstances, i.e. a computer to use for free for a summer when the schools were closed, I started out on Windows instead of Apple like most graphic arts people.
The computer had 1 Megabyte of ram, and a 40 Megabyte hard drive, (my present computer has 3,250,000 megabytes of internal disk space and 32,000 megabytes of ram), at that time Windows used 17 megabytes of disk space and came on about 16 floppy disks.
I got an OK and a check from the schools to put in more ram so that was my first foray into computer hardware.
I upgraded it to 4 megabytes of ram at a cost of $300 dollars!!!
In the fall when I had to give the computer back I went and bought one of my own.
The school system gave me legitimate copies of Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator that I could register in my name, because I was doing graphics for them by this time.
These were all for Windows, and I didn't want to have to buy Apple versions so bought a PC instead of a Mac.
I considered switching several times but was always faced with buying software that cost as much as the computer so I stuck with Windows.
I became a gamer, and that led my to getting into configuring things writing instructions in Dos to configure ram usage etc, because it could take you a day of tweaking just to get a game to run back then.
From there on it was just learn as you go, for the next 20 odd years.
Mostly I learn by screwing up my computers and having to fix them, I've never taken a computer to be fixed by someone else and I've always managed to get it fixed in the end.
I've done beta testing on practically every major MMO starting with Asheron's call.
And I was a tester from the start on Windows 7, 8 and 10.
So basically I just wing it. LOL
Mike