Introduction

I have spent most of my of my adult life working with computers and other technical hardware. I ran a repair department for Supra Modems and also was the Customer Support manager for a small software company.

I've been messing with computers ever since my Siclair ZX-80 showed up in the mail. A wonderful machine with 1K RAM and no moving graphics. But it was cool to type in basic programs and save them to my tape recorder. Later on I purchased a Commodore 64 for $300 and eventually got the matching floppy drive for another $300. I had to put a fan on top of the drive to keep it cool as it loaded. Programs would add errors to the disk as copy protection and the disk drive would slam on the inside when it encountered these errors. The fan was needed to keep the drive from going out of alignment. Those were the good ole days.

A few years later I was building BBS systems, the first run on an IBM XP clone. It had 1 phone line and 60 megs of hard drive space. Pretty hefty stuff at the time. A few years later I had an 8 line BBS in my house with 3 networked computers. That was fun stuff before the internet was available to the general public.

I've been doing this stuff on the cheap for years and years, hence "The cheap tech guy".

I got laid off when the software company I worked for did a major downsize (they do software for the auto industry) but I love to help people out and provide support. So this is my way of contributing some of what I know to the outside world :)

Check out my links, and I will be digging more up and providing some helpful information for the average user to get the most out of their PC.

Thanks for reading,
Dan