squeegee started this discussion 11 years ago#39,049
pretty proud of my nephew. for christmas he wanted to build his dad a new gaming PC because his is pretty old now and struggles to play his favorite games. so he passed the hat and everyone chipped in and he picked out all the parts and did everything himself. his grandparents floated him a good bit to help him get everything he wanted.
backup 4 years: when he was 11 his dad wanted to build his son a gaming PC. i suggested we don't build it ourselves, but use it as an opportunity to teach him how to work on computers on his own. he was about the age i got my first computer and started learning to work on them. So i helped my brother pick all the parts and on christmas day his kid got to open up all these crazy components and by the time he had a pile of parts he was ecstatic and super enthusiastic about learning to build it all out. we spent the afternoon teaching him what all the parts are and the basic ordering of installation steps. he tightened every screw and pressed in every card. He installed all of the software and did all of the updates on his own, but, with our instruction and supervision.
the next few years: he has since upgraded every component (the PC we built was good, not excellent. a budget build) and maintained the entire system by himself. He has learned a ton about the web, about hardware, about software, and knows quite a lot of esoteric information about things i'm only generally aware of. he's even getting into linux.
just before christmas: every part that was picked was picked by him. He knew what he wanted/needed and got the best prices by shopping early and waiting for sales. i saw the list of parts he was after and everything on it was right in the sweet spot of price/quality. he didn't even do the usual thing of buying a cheap ass motherboard to be able to afford a bad ass video card, all of the parts are the parts that are being recommended as "best bang for your buck" type parts. he did thorough research and ended up with the parts to build an excellent system. then he built the system out with absolutely zero help from me. i'd look in from time to time and he didn't need my help at all. before i knew it he was up and running and installing his dad's favorite games.
conclusion: it was really cool. i feel like the lessons we taught him years ago have given him a hobby or even a career that he can enjoy for the rest of his life. he's getting to be fully self sufficient in his computer use which is a great thing to see. he's very comfortable digging into a case and yanking out memory or coolers or whatever, and so he'll never have to suffer the "store bought PC" loaded with proprietary everything and bloat. so i'm pretty proud of the little dude, and his dad was absolutely beaming when he opened it up and we told him the story. it was cool to have helped make that kind of father/son moment.
Anonymous B joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 51 seconds later[^][v]#520,197
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Anonymous C joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 3 minutes later, 3 minutes after the original post[^][v]#520,198
Nice! That's awesome to hear, and you definitely made the right decision by having him build that first computer himself. Too many kids these days just see them as magical internet boxes and do not understand what is happening at all.
squeegee (OP) replied with this 11 years ago, 5 minutes later, 9 minutes after the original post[^][v]#520,202
@previous (C)
once we showed him he was pretty impressed that it was so easy. He thought there was soldering involved and stuff. he didn't know it's basically no more complicated than following lego instructions or an erector set or something. half the battle is knowing what to buy, the other half is knowing where they plug in. so yeah, he was able to do it once and it dispelled that "magical internet box" image for him.