Generally, My first encounter with a computer was my family's 486 computer, with dos then at a latter point windows 3.1, with my dad and my brother at a young age showing my what I needed to do to play various games of that timeline. My and my brother use to fiddle with lots of different things here and there, and most of the time when my dad could not think of a thing, we'd usually end up relying on my 2 cousins to do our tech support for us. They ended up coming at a fast rate too, so my and my brother were educated on what to do and what not to do, and in any instance if something shoul go wrong we were taught a few things here and there of recovery tools in windows.
Later on in life, my hardware interest started. I watched my brother messing with computer insides. Around this time, I owned a cyrix 686 based setup (heh, my old belated Cyrix 686 PR200+, that went through various heatsinks and a few different cases to be cooled properly due to it overheating a lot). After seeing all of this done by others to my pc, I decided it was time for me to do things of my own with hardware, so I decided to purchase subscriptions to magazines with saved up pocket money (by doing jobs that kids would do for pocket money, lawn mowing, car washing, cleaning the house etc). From there I was reading a lot, however my hardware knowledge on the technical side of things was still a little weak, up untill the point where I had my pci gfx card fell out of it's slot, I decided "well, masewell shove it back in myself, how hard can that be?", and from there I felt a bit more confident and eventually learnt how to palce heatsinks/thermal paste on processors, how to install memory and ensure that it's working.
4 years down the track my teacher from school realized I had some fairly good computer knowledge, getting high marks in a primary school computer test, and therefore gave me an opportunity to learn more about computing with fixing computers around the school along with the teacher that was incharge of the school's computer network.
After that, high school was when I really geeked into computers, with fellow nerds, always talking about AMD vs Intel, ATI vs Nvidia, manufacturer vs manufacturer etc. At around this time I also began reading lots and lots of benchmarks and articles/guides online, and fixing computers for a few of my friends that had no ideas on how to fix their computers.
From here on out, I have just about finished my yr10 course at tafe (which is practically college here in Australia), which I ended up in the first place though because sadly my mum had me kicked out of school in 2005
. After this is complete I can head into cert 4 in IT, which is considered yr12 equivalent by the college and look into doing a 2 year diploma in IT. Hopefully, after that I could possibly look into doing some university studies (I hope
).
And as always, some trial and error.