I'm one of the lucky ones - my hobby is my work!  I first started using computers many years ago (around the 286 days) and was simply a user.  When I lost my job in 1976 I bought my first PC and after 3 months wanted my first upgrade.  When I saw what they did and what they charged, I said to myself "I can do that"!  Since then I've been on my own.  I have a very small computer company here in Germany and have had to learn everything myself - no courses, but hundreds of hours reading and trying out what I learned.

WISE is one of my favorite programming tools.  You're only supposed to use it to program installation routines, but I found out quickly you can do a lot more with it!  We had one instance where over 500 notebooks were infected with a virus that first deactivated Norton, and then prevented the PC from booting (WinNT).  With WISE and NTFSPRO and Norton, I was able to write a routine that cleaned everything up!.

And I love DOS!  So many people have forgotten the good old days of FAST, STABLE DOS and don't realize it can still help in a lot of situations today.

I am glad I found Experts Exchange!  It is now one of my primary hobbies because it lets me try to help people all over the world with what I have learned through experience.  It is my standard START site.  I only want to help.  I have even included my ranking (which changes all the time) in my resume for reference purposes!  I've seen a lot of FORUMS, but Experts Exchange is the best for me.

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My favorite Experts:

LucF
CrazyOne
nobus
Cyber-Dude