“My oldest son is a fairly typical 15 year-old end user. He’s on
the computer all the time, has a decent idea how to get things
done, and is largely not interested in the inner workings of
hardware or operating system. He, like most other users, just wants
the computer to work.“This isn’t actually a bad expectation. We don’t usually expect
our computers not to work, do we? Unfortunately for him, he
recently inherited my tinkering machine. It’s a beast in every
sense of the word: 17″ screen, big hard drive, Core 2 Duo, 2GB of
RAM, and all the usual multimedia goodies. It’s also running 64-bit
Ubuntu with XP in a virtual machine…”