Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
I’d add that PCs also had great gaming, which also encourages upgrading, and PCs have always offered more options for upgrading. You learn a lot and can break a lot doing that, both of which add to the experience.
I’ll always remember when I accidentally bent a CPU pin and had to manually straighten it with pliers… it was terrifying 😭 (but that CPU is still working perfectly in my computer 7 years later !)
I dropped a new CPU and bent a whole row of pins such that they were just touching the pins on the row beside them. I wondered for a long time how I was going to bend them back and get them all straight again. Managed it with a stiff credit card edge and was so relieved when it booted!
My family just got a new computer; running the brand new Win95. It was so fancy, I can’t remember what game it was, but I couldn’t get the sound to work, so I tried reinstalling the sound drivers…
I managed to completely nuke our 2 day old PC. Had to get a friend of my stepdad to come and fix it…basically reinstall Windows. I have no idea what I did, but I did learn from that point, you can basically fix anything not hardware related given a bit of time and knowledge.
And that was my origin story, been using Linux full time since 2007, and dabbled for a few years before that.
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
I’d add that PCs also had great gaming, which also encourages upgrading, and PCs have always offered more options for upgrading. You learn a lot and can break a lot doing that, both of which add to the experience.
I’ll always remember when I accidentally bent a CPU pin and had to manually straighten it with pliers… it was terrifying 😭 (but that CPU is still working perfectly in my computer 7 years later !)
I dropped a new CPU and bent a whole row of pins such that they were just touching the pins on the row beside them. I wondered for a long time how I was going to bend them back and get them all straight again. Managed it with a stiff credit card edge and was so relieved when it booted!
I mean, I managed to fuck up my Windows 95 just by installing a couple of games. God knows how that happened.
I remember!
My family just got a new computer; running the brand new Win95. It was so fancy, I can’t remember what game it was, but I couldn’t get the sound to work, so I tried reinstalling the sound drivers…
I managed to completely nuke our 2 day old PC. Had to get a friend of my stepdad to come and fix it…basically reinstall Windows. I have no idea what I did, but I did learn from that point, you can basically fix anything not hardware related given a bit of time and knowledge.
And that was my origin story, been using Linux full time since 2007, and dabbled for a few years before that.
“Reinstall windows” was such a common solution, I still have my windows 95 and my windows XP key memorized (and no, not the FCKGW one)
And it always took so fucking long.
Same, but I did not mess with the drivers. Learnt quickly how to format and reinstall after the first visit from the “computer guy”.
Same. Got tricked into deleting System32 at age…7 maybe? Started learning a lot from that point on.