New Members - please post your introductions here

[ThEeDaRkOnE]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Big howdy to all of you loverly peoples out there... Seems like a good forum.

[ricktheslickster]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Umm.. hey everyone. I read some of the rules on this site and I suppose I start out with zero points and I want to be able to access as much of this site as I can so I'm beginning by saying hello to everyone. Here's my background:

This turned out to be a longer write up than I first imagined. I apologize, once I went back into my memories of how i got into this field, it was hard to stop writing. A US Navy Vet served 4 years with honorable discharge, submarines Simon Bolivar SSBN 641 Blue crew 82'-84. USS ortolan ASR-22 '84-86. Charleston, sc

Got out of Navy at 21-yrs old. Didn't have much training in the 4 years I was in, became an HT onboard the USS Ortolan (wielding) Wanted to be an electronics tech. Seen ad in paper gov. funded grant for vets to go to school to learn a trade and they paid me to go. Signed up at local community college for class in industrial electronics and computer repair. Graduated 8 months later was hired on with a company before I completed school, as an entry level video game repair technician back in the late 80's when coin operated video games were at it's peek. great job for young adult to work in if you like playing video games. we had access to all the new titles. Anyway worked with them for a total of 8-10 years I believe. Became service manager for the myrtle Beach office...Back then, most pc-boards were fitted with 7400 series chips and were big enough to desolder and swap out, so I became a component level repair tech for the company I worked for until I became service manager. Maintained my status as such even after being the service manager. this is when I got my feet wet with EEPROM's and programming them with hardware attached to a 286/386 computer. began feeling I've reached the peak of knowledge with them about this time and became board working there, wanted something more challenging and cutting edge. Opened a computer magazine one day at the grocery store, not knowing a single thing about computers, found some of the article interesting, bought the mag took it home read thru it. there were so many articles in there about how to de-frag a hard drive, move TSR up into upper memory and such that I felt I knew enough about computers to at least know what I'm buying, so after two months since I opened that magazine I was ordering my first Packard Bell 80286 IBM compatible PC. The specs were 16Mhz CPU, 1Meg of RAM, 32MB hard drive, VGA graphics, 1.2KB 5.25 floppy and a 1.4 3.5" floppy. And DOS 3.0. I ordered the computer from a back-page add from some outfit in calif. mail order, (Back then in 1989,there wasn't a single computer store in Myrtle Beach), the computer cost a wopping $1600, AND it came with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to boot! What a deal right? and that began my move into the computer world. This was 1990. By 1997 I was fired from my job because I would stay up all night tinkering with my new found passion, and couldn't get enough sleep at night to be able to go to work the following day. To me this was just what the doctor ordered. I couldn't get enough of it, and thinking about it now, looking back, I was working with DOS, and I thought, this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I can't even imagine now, what I was doing all those nights tinkering when all I had to work with was DOS 3.0. Whatever it was, I was sold! Didn't care about my job, or my marriage. all I wanted to do is go home and operate and find out what other things I could do with this awesome machine. by my second year playing with this 80286, I had a full bore BBS system I was a sysop on and pretty handy working on at least my computer. I had learned all about IRQ's and adapter addresses that needed to be set first before you could place a newly bought adapter card into your PC (No plug 'n pray back then) And talk on the street was Intel is coming out with a new CPU called the 80386, and although the 80286 was designed to multitask, this new chip would do it even better, the software industry was far behind the hardware side, so even though the 80286 was supposed to multi task, I wasn't even sure what that meant? There was no software that I knew about back then that would take advantage of those features. I supposed WINDOWS had been out for a few years by now with something less than Windows 3.0, otherwise how did they get to 3.0? But I caught word somewhere about this program called Windows made by microsoft that was suppose to revolutionize the PC. I called some Pirate BBS up in N.Y. and downloaded this Windows to see what the fuse was all about. Man talk about a costly long distance phone call! I took half a day to download the complete package. But I got it, and took over an hour to install, but I installed it. And my first reaction was, what the hell is this? It had a few windows on the screen . One window had a calculator (and I'm thinking to myself wow i sure hope there's more to this than just being a calculator) Another window had notepad and Wordpad in it. and a few other things. Oh yeah and this clock that looked really cool almost looked real, but other than that, I wasn't very impressed to say the least. And it took so long to install, and consumed so much of my little 32Mb hard drive (Back then that was a fairly large hard drive, most were only at 20MB) That after running it once or twice trying to understand what the fuss was all about, I finally removed it completely from my hard drive, and went on with my duties as a BBS sysop. (I remember now that there was this one piece of software that allowed me to have two modems installed in my machine, and with two phone lines coming into my home, I could technically maintain an opened line BBS in one window while I was calling other BBS's in another window, and I thought this was even better than receiving my first PC a few years back. So I was already multitasking back then, just didn't know that's what I was doing. that software if I remember correctly was called QuarterDeck I believe. Needles to say by 1997 my wife left me, wasn't paying her enough attention. And in between jobs, I moved back to charleston, (home town) and began thinking perhaps I should find a job working on computers, after all, I've maintained my own for the last few years as well as all my neighbors who had one always found out one way or another that I was good with them. Just wasn't a whole lot of people who actually had these things at home back then. At least I felt back then, that I finally made it to the cutting-edge of technology. It came at a price though to make a long story short, landing a job with a local computer tech company, and that's when I was first exposed to Windows NT and the Internet as well. Hard to believe all these years me running a BBS, and never did I know anything about this World-Wide-Web stuff was going on??? How did I miss such a thing? why wasn't I aware of this? Who out there remember's Netscape? I just learned not too long ago, and am not sure this is accurate, but they turned into Firefox over the years?

So now I'm 54 years old, and had my fill working for Corporate America in the IT field. A+ certified for life, Microsoft Certified, since 1998. Never made it to MCSE, wanted it, but what I didn't learn in books, I learned the tough way, in real life. tired of working for someone else I broke out of that and started working for myself. Now I have my own little one man company fixing PC's and TV's for the local crowd, and I am loving it. So I have tons of experience, some of it I have forgotten over the years, some of it has stuck with me. I can never really depart from it all together. Never felt the need too. I'm not the Guru anymore but enjoying the stress free lifestyle i do live. I mainly work on residential computers because of the lack of stress. I could work in a server farm if need be, but dis-like all the ass kissing and people stuck in middle management who blow a fuse when a server losses one of it's drives in a raid 5 configuration and is breathing down my neck to get it fixed.I can do without all that stress these people bring upon themselves. It's not that serious people, relax, take a chill-pill, just so long as that server doesn't give up another hard drive from that raid, no one will notice it ever happened to begin with.

[ijal]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi all!

[berber]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

hello dear

plz i need bios bin for hp 15-ay012nf BDL50 LA-D702P Rev: 3.0
date :2016-06-15

[Ruan]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

I would like to say hello to everyone.

[dest234]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Interesting thing... I'm a member of this forum for a lot of time, but since that it is my first post...

[Plane Nuts]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi All from Montréal Canada
Thank-you for accepting me to this site, lots of great info.

[papazote]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi, I'm new here.

[aeboyer]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi. I'm new. I'm posting here to so I can post a question on the TV troubleshooting section

[j4m35]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello. I'm new. Hope to learn lots from everyone here.

[satspace]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi everyone
fantastic community. Thanks a lot!

[davem12]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi,
Finally found this great place. Hope to learn and contribute to this forum

[fred23456]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi there,

I'm Fred, been learning component level repair for a few months from a position of 0 experience before that. By trade I'm an ERP system consultant. I've been working on water damaged Macbooks and now I'm hooked!

Looking for some advice from the community for a couple of Macbooks I'm really stuck with.

Hopefully I can help some of you guys out as well with areas I'm more knowledgeable in.

All the best

[setzer_]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello everyone, trying to delve deeper into the design of televisions so I can fix current issues as well as any issues that arise in the future!

- Dan

[tandrews_ny]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello all,
I'm Thomas from NY. I like to dabble in repairing things most would trash (old computers and the like). I have repaired some fun things like old IBM servers (8580).

I'm hoping to learn from other like minded people and grow as a technician.

[Alastorr]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Howdy everyone!
I'm Ashley, or Alastor, or Angel Dust, or AlbinoLeviathan. I'm from Australia, moved to Ohio, US, and now living in Florida, US.
I love hardware, technology, and software. I love taking old stuff, and making them useful for 2019-use. I have taken apart, and repaired many devices before such as very old phones, and upgrading laptops.

My main goal is to learn more, and more. There is always something to learn, and improve on.
I hope to learn more about anything, and everything in here! <3

[Scorpio9]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello to all. Im here to find that ever so elusive information to save some poor broken piece of electronics from the scrap heap. I have been repairing electronics gear since 1976 then i repaired my very first TV. IM here to help and pick the brains of others.

[integral_Rosen]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello.

[dom0]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi all, I'm an electronics tinkerer and currently somewhat out of my depth with a current repair job - I heard this is the place to ask...

[MarcD777]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hey.

I'm Marc and live in Erlangen, Germany. I studied electrical engineering many years ago and want to get back into component level repair for the fun of it. I'm a bit rusty and will probably need some refreshing from time to time...

Cheers