windows 10 Thank You!

[Guest Chuck.Henson]

To whom it may concern: I feel sometimes that I don’t always appreciate the things I’ve had my entire life. My father’s old watch for example. Every now and again I’ll pull it out of its resting place to wind it up and set the correct date and time. It experiences these short breaths of life before I replace it to the nightstand drawer to quietly tick and collect dust. Now on my wrist is a watch with a little GPS and the ability to connect to my smartphone. Not only can I tell the time, but I can track my activity and be notified when someone tries to contact me. Things have changed so much since I was a kid. We’ve traded Seinfeld reruns for Netflix and cassettes for mp3s. However, one thing hasn’t changed: when I turn on my computer the same logo still pops up. It's been updated to be faster, cleaner, and more reliable but it's still Windows. As a child, it started with 95 before moving along to 98 and finally XP. At home I played games like Rollercoaster Tycoon, learned basic math skills, and watched my mom work. With the coming of XP, so came the higher frequency of the public school putting us in front of computers. I learned to write with Word, learned to make presentations with PowerPoint, how to make spreadsheets with Excel, how to type, and how to use the internet. By the time I was entering high school, my sister was off to college with a new laptop and Vista. At this point my family upgraded from dial-up and I could use a computer better than both of my parents. I began teaching myself how to use our family computer better and better. I could rid our PC of viruses, download music and videos, and began communicating with my friends in ways it had never been done before. To this day I am still teaching my folks how to do two out of the three. Soon I side-loaded Ubuntu and started to frustrate my parents by making them choose an operating system on startup every time. Linux taught how to speak to a computer like a caveman using sudo but the more I played and experimented with Linux, the more I realized how much I needed Windows to do any real work. I left high school on track to enter university during the fall. This gave me two choices: a MacBook or a laptop that was faster, had more storage, had more memory, and was $400 cheaper. The choice was much easier than many of my classmates would have believed. I chose an Asus that came with a free Xbox 360 Slim. I chose the Asus not only because I knew it was more powerful in every way, but also it had bamboo paneling. I loved my laptop. I loved it when I upgraded from 7 to Windows 8. It was with me for my first two and half years of college. That computer taught me two things: never let your roommate who just declared Computer Science as their major play around with your only computer and $200 may get you something quickly but it probably won’t last. The death of the Asus made me have to buy a computer as fast as I could. I decided on a Samsung Chromebook. It was great for a month or two; it was fast, easy to use, and the web apps to write documents were free. However, just over a year later I had to have a new PC. The Chromebook could not handle the remainder of my tenure at university. The PC I ended up buying was probably the best I had ever owned. It was an HP all-in-one and shortly after buying it, the Windows 10 update was being rolled out. It wasn’t the best on the market by any means. It wasn’t portable so it had to stay tied to my desk. I still loved it. It could handle anything I threw at it and worked like a champ the entire time I had it. Windows 10 was the best operating system I had ever used and made my life and my schoolwork much easier. My HP helped me finish university and came with me along the way through the beginning of my early adulthood. However, my HP died an unfortunate and untimely, premature death. My HP was able to take me out of the restaurant industry and into my real job. It was three days before I started my new job in Atlanta that a storm came through Carrollton, GA -- the town I went to college and was living in. The violent storm brought a tree crashing down in a fit of rage on top on the house we were living, specifically on top of the office. Among other things, my computer had taken a direct hit. So, it's gone. I now work for the Atlanta Police Department doing Crime Prevention and working closely with the community. I cannot wait to be able to to buy a new laptop (the Surface Pro laptops are perfect for everything I need a laptop to be). It is here, now, that I truly realized how much of my life, my experiences, my education, and my successes that I owe to Microsoft. Not to mention the quality time I spent with my father playing the original Halo on co-op. My entire life Microsoft has been there, by my side, every step of the way. And to think, I’ve never gotten you anything. So, thank you. Thank you to customer service to development to Bill Gates and everywhere in-between. Thank you, Microsoft for being there for me my whole life. I’ll see you at work and I’ll bring you back into my home as soon as I can. Sincerely, Chuck Henson

 

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