The troubles are actually that of my friend and his dad. Considering I'm the only person they know that knows how to build/fix computers, I get all their work. They're also the people I rent my room from, so I usually end up doing all this work for free. I swear to God if I only charged $10/hour, I would have an extra $500 in my pocket over the last 6 months.
They bought a brand-spanking new Dell laptop three months ago, and I've already had to reformat and re-install Windows it was so bad.
The kid's father used it
again for a couple hours last week, and the ****ing thing gets literally 15 popups when they sign on AIM.
So they bought another new Dell laptop...
His dad says he wants a computer "Nobody's touched yet" so it doesn't get ****ed up... That goddamn guy needs to be banned from using the Internet, or start paying me.
As for me, back when I was like 12, my mom bought a computer from Home Shopping Network. For one reason or another we ended up getting it "Upgraded" by the local computer repair shop. (Originally it was an Intel with 75 MHz with 16MB of RAM. It was upgraded to a 133MHz chip and 32MB of RAM)
After being scammed out of $2000, my computer was still ****ed up and didn't run right... I suppose you could say that was an incentive I had to learn about building/fixing computer hardware and software.
On a sidenote, the son of the guy that ran that repair shop was busted by the FBI for trying to crack into a government server and tax evasion.