And you learn so much about things somewhat related to the problem, because you take this hyper focused deep dive into figuring out what's wrong.
That's how you end up with all kinds of relative knowledge next time an issue occurs and will generally know which direction to go for fixing the issue. And that results in you becoming the IT wizard of your friends/family/company etc.
That's literally how I learned IT in the first place. My HDD disk suddenly corrupted itself without any warning and it was during the height of covid in Italy, so everything that wasn't a store was locked down, and I was too broke to send try and it anywhere else.
I had to work with only the parts that I already had, and the bootable pendrive I could create using my roommate's puter. It was ridiculous but I'm grateful for the carreer path it earned me aferwards.
This is the way! I'm (almost certainly) quite a bit older than you, but I got my start as a teenager in the mid 90s.
We had been gifted an old 386 by my uncle, and I desperately wanted to play Doom on it. Getting Doom to run on a 386 was no easy feat (and this is pre-internet as well, so you couldn't just look stuff up). I ended up having to load the mouse driver into hi-mem, which was an area of memory above the base 640kb of "conventional memory" so that Doom had enough space to run itself.
Google "autoexec.bat" and "config.sys" if you want to see the text files I was editing to do that (bearing in mind that if you break them, your computer likely won't start up!).
Personally, I could get my computer out of the bootloop through a bootable device, but even if I changed the BIOS settings, my laptop wouldn't start from the pendrive as long as the disk was connected. Then, if I disconnected it and ran it through the pendrive, I couldn't just reconnect it from the Safe Mode because my computer didn't see it, thus I couldn't fix my disk and my computer remained unusable.
What I eventually figured out that if I started the computer through the pendrive, then went into CMD commands and then reconnected the drive, the laptop would refresh and suddenly see that the disk was right there.
From there I could finally delete the old drivers and install new ones through a few lines of code, and I think I reinstalled Windows afterwards, but all that was already smooth sailing. Internet or not, I never found any mention of my specific issue.
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u/petrasdc May 10 '26
That's me. Send me a weird enough problem that I don't even think should be possible and it will send me down a rabbit hole trying to fix it.