I never really got into file sharing early on, I somehow jumped onto torrents instead and soon after migrated to Linux distro hopping for a while.
All the while I kept fixing PCs for family and friends.
Almost all of them were worn down, infected and affected by the 12 year old in the house who tried to download anything and everything they could find. Their only limiting factor was hard drive space, otherwise they would have downloaded the internet if given the chance.
I remember starting up a Windows PC I volunteered to fix, waiting half an hour for it to finish its start up routine, go into it’s start up programs and discover a list of 200 weird items that came on at every start up … delete or remove all of them … restart, wait again and now there were 100 items at start up … research how to remove things, rinse repeat for about two days and finally gain back normal control of everything. Then move, back up or just delete a bunch of junk to take back hard drive space.
Hand it back to the owner who put it back in their home office and their 12 year old would start downloading things again.
It would take me days to fix it and the kid would take hours to ruin it all.
Then the parents would blame shitty software or hardware and go out and buy a new faster system.
The only side benefit to all this was that I ended up collecting a bunch of old systems, laptops and tablets that I fixed or used as Linux test systems and learned a lot from.
I never really got into file sharing early on, I somehow jumped onto torrents instead and soon after migrated to Linux distro hopping for a while.
All the while I kept fixing PCs for family and friends.
Almost all of them were worn down, infected and affected by the 12 year old in the house who tried to download anything and everything they could find. Their only limiting factor was hard drive space, otherwise they would have downloaded the internet if given the chance.
I remember starting up a Windows PC I volunteered to fix, waiting half an hour for it to finish its start up routine, go into it’s start up programs and discover a list of 200 weird items that came on at every start up … delete or remove all of them … restart, wait again and now there were 100 items at start up … research how to remove things, rinse repeat for about two days and finally gain back normal control of everything. Then move, back up or just delete a bunch of junk to take back hard drive space.
Hand it back to the owner who put it back in their home office and their 12 year old would start downloading things again.
It would take me days to fix it and the kid would take hours to ruin it all.
Then the parents would blame shitty software or hardware and go out and buy a new faster system.
The only side benefit to all this was that I ended up collecting a bunch of old systems, laptops and tablets that I fixed or used as Linux test systems and learned a lot from.