So this is going to sound really dumb, but until that point I had never had to buy my own software. The other problem that I found was that of software. It is actually a good thing, and it's still present in Windows today the difference is that in it's infancy UAC would just nag you about every little thing you were trying to do. For those of you who never experienced the UAC debacle, it was Microsoft's attempt to try and help people be less vulnerable to malware. Granted, this was before I really had an appreciation for cybersecurity, so I kind of wonder if I would feel differently using it today. We'd had our new machines for a few months and things were going well, but I was getting really annoyed with Vista's User Account Control feature. Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS with the Gnome 2 desktop released in April of 2010. It was a nice change going from the 15 inch Inspiron to an 11 inch netbook and XP ran pretty well, even with it's Intel Atom CPU and it's 1 GB of memory. They were basically tiny laptops, usually 9 - 11 inch screens, with underpowered hardware that were designed to be ultra portable. Now I'm not sure if you were around for the netbook era. We opted for an all-in-one touchscreen HP desktop running Windows Vista Home, and an Acer Aspire One netbook running Windows XP Home. We wanted to get a family PC for the house, but I was transferring to a new school and needed something as well. It had gotten to the point that one day I powered it on and it took nearly 10 minutes to boot to the login screen. It had been a solid machine and had served her well through her college days, but the battery was struggling to hold a charge and the OS was getting slower and slower. I had given my college desktop PC to a friend before we had moved out of state and we were sharing her aging Dell laptop (an Inspiron 5000). Gregg (when they still had physical retail stores).

I remember the day in late summer of 2009 my wife and I took our firstborn to our local H.H. The story of part 1 ended in 2009 with my family's move to Windows Vista.

My family were early adopters to the internet back then, and like so many others I have the dial up sound burned into my memory along with the AOL guy welcoming us and proclaiming that we did, in fact, have mail! It was a simpler time and may seem quaint these days, but that was all we had. Like many 90's kids, my experience was of Windows 95, 98, ME, and XP. In part 1 of this series I shared the story of my early years in desktop computing.

Microsoft silverlight on mac os