I own two computers, an iMac from the early 2010’s, and an Acer Aspire series laptop. Both of which have had operating system failures (PSA: always backup your hard drive). Now, as I didn’t want to spend money sending them in for repairs, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and learned quite a bit from it as a result.
I was trying to install Linux on my old laptop, as I heard it was a much more efficient option for budget computers, and old laptops especially, so I figured I’d spare my old Celeron processor and try installing it…
And in the process broke my Windows installation and had it refuse to install Linux onto its hard drive… Around this time I had also been failing to recover a version of MacOS to allow my iMac to be functional once more… But both seemed like lost causes, and all I was left with were two computers with no proper operating system, and a USB drive flashed with a Linux distro.
Eventually I realized that my last bet was to try and put Linux on my iMac, a task that I had thought would be complex, foolish, possibly even dangerous to the device, but in reality went as smoothly as it could have gone, and after learning many a thing about Linux, I now had a computer that, while not being able to run apps that require hardware acceleration, was otherwise fully functional, and very efficient. Now all that was left was my laptop.
I had fought and fought with Linux and this Acer Aspire laptop, and as hard as I tried, as many tweaks I made to the BIOS, for whatever reason it refused to accept a Linux installation onto its hard drive, and so I decided that I might as well try to put Windows on it once again, but this time use a version of it that was less intensive, so I tried out NTDEV’s tiny10, and with it, I set up my drivers, and had a near fully functioning laptop!
Then my Grandparents gave me their old laptop (which was the exact model that I had) and told me that they had taken it to a repair shop, but were told it was beyond repair… This sounded like a challenge, and one I was willing to accept… Except it wasn’t, and apparently the repair shop person just wanted to sell an expensive computer to my oblivious granddad, because I managed to get it up and running incredibly easily, and after setting up the proper drivers, gave it to my brother for him to use.
So, needless to say, I’m able to install operating systems and set them up fairly adequately, I will admit, I’ve since run into issues on the machines, but most of them should be fairly simple repairs once I have the time to look into why they’re happening and how to repair them. I definitely am curious about the process of setting up MacOS from scratch . Perhaps some day I’ll be able to learn that, but for now I’m content knowing I can set up and maintain both Windows and Linux machines.