Who Am I ?

Introduction

Thank you for visiting my reference homepage.  First, the bad news.  I don't have any formal training in computers or technologies.  I don't even know how to write a program.

The good news is everything I listed came extensively from my own experience, experimentation, explorations and discoveries with the computer systems I have worked on, and they have worked without problems to date.

Close encounters of the computer kind

My initiation to a computer was to play a 747 flight simulation game on my friend Stephen Yung's Apple IIe clone.  If I remember correctly it was called a "Pineapple".  I was in such awe of the whole thing that put me off touching another computer for years.  Next came university (I was awared a B.Sc.(Hons) degree in Accounting) and within the first weeks I met John G. Walsh who became one of my good friends.  He introduced me to his Commodore Amiga and my first encounter to GUI and a mouse (John, wherever you are, thank you).  In those days only a handful of people had a computer, let alone an up-to-date one.  Actually, John turned out to be the only person I knew who had a computer.  I was right at home with the mouse and the GUI, and all those years of being put off by a computer simply dissolved.

Next personal breakthrough came with my first computer in 1994: a Texas Instruments TravelMate¹ 4000E, a notebook computer with a 486DX/2 CPU, 9" DualScan colour LCD, 8MB RAM (later upgraded to 20MB), Microsoft BallPoint mouse version 2 (I still consider this to be the most ergonomically correct mouse ever!), and 200MB drive running on MS-DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1.  It could boot to Windows in 27 seconds!  I was hooked on my new toy from the start.  I started reading books on what made the operating systems sing.  I tweaked this, tweaked that in order to maximize memory under DOS and speed under Windows.

Sadly, the TravelMate began to die in 1997, and to my disappointment but not surprisingly, Acer¹ (now the owner of Texas Instruments notebook division) failed miserably at fixing it.  By that time I was very comfortable with the idea of building my first computer from parts, but I made a rather interesting discovery: at the specifications I wanted at the time it would cost me over 20% more than simply ordering a system of the same specs from Dell, and I have been a fan of the brand ever since.  While I have recommended Dell systems to many of my friends, I do my research constantly to ensure I am recommending the best system they can get for their money, based on a Cost versus Benefit and VFM (value for money)  model - being cheapest doesn't always give the best deal or the best value.

The purpose of this homepage

I get asked by many friends in person, on the phone, or by email (I even get the occasional request from strangers via ICQ) for years with questions like "how to set this up?", "how do I do that?", "which programs do I need to do this?", "how do I fix....?", etc., etc.  Tired of having to repeat myself, I decided to build up a collection of my answers.  Its main purpose is to provide a quick reference for my friends online.  This list is by no means definitive, extensive or exclusive, and I hope to keep adding, updating and improving the materials over time, but because I am writing this in my spare time, I can only keep up with myself.  I will include a section of URLs to external resources under each topic, so in case a topic hasn't been covered by me, you may find it somewhere else.  If you don't see a section listing external resources, it's most probably because it is work-in-progress.

I hope you find the materials helpful.

( : pHILIP : )