A family friend's kid asked me to take a look at a old computer he got as a gift from an uncle, so I decided to help, secretly hoping he learns computing is pretty cool.
Last week a kid I know told me he had gotten a new (to him) computer, and asked me if I could get it to be faster so he can play some games, I nonchalantly accepted, thinking it was a laptop I could carry on my backpack and call it a day. Turns out, it was an whole desktop computer that was fairly old and weak, given to him probably by an uncle or something.
It was one of those typical slim kinda generic HP models, with some kind of Intel Core Duo, no graphics card and a single 2GB ram stick. Horrible performance, bloatware—such as custom docks and widgets, cracked games like Plants vs Zombies or Angry Birds, too many antiviruses and performance boosters. The background was a gallery of pictures changing from time to time, and I couldn’t remove it because Windows 10 wasn’t even activated.
At first I wanted to install Linux Mint on it, but I was not willing to end up as tech support that much, so I added an extra stick with 4 GB of ram, did a clean install of Windows 10, and it ended up perfectly usable for basic browsing, office work and simple old games and emulators.
Here’s a list of the programs I got for him:
Firefox
Steam
WPS Office
Project 64 1.6
mGBA
7-Zip
VLC
And the accounts I made for him were:
Proton
Steam
Firefox
I installed an old version of Project 64, simply because newer stuff, including Mupen64Plus, would not run on that computer. I did not want to bother setting up Retroarch, since it’s something I have never done and didn’t want to do a poor job of it.
When I was his age, maybe a year older than him, I was not into Linux, at all. But I did my fair share of computing in the areas I understood, such as emulation.
Given everything I just did, I wondered: how do kids learn computing today?
Most of the technical stuff I imagine them doing is playing Roblox or Fortnite, but most of the time, that’s done on their phones, I don’t know why I feel like most kids today can hardly use a mouse.
I don’t want to ridicule kids at all, they learn fast, I learned fast back then, but I think more kids today are more used to touch screens than to computers. Many of them maybe have never even opened a program with a menu bar, or edited the keyboard controls of any game.
I remember setting up my own control scheme to be able to play multiplayer Smash Bros 64 on a single keyboard, and us kids all around the computer to see, I remember trying to make Windows XP look like Vista, I remember getting games installed out of a CD-ROM. I remember chatting around on Windows Live Messenger, I even remember editing videos on Sony Vegas for some reason, all of these things were interesting to me, I wanted to know how it all worked, and I think some kids lack that interest.
When I gave him his computer back I was very clear with him. It’s ok if he doesn’t know how to do things, but I would not be his first option if any problem showed up. He should learn to look things up himself, and maybe one day he too could be setting up computers for others and make a a bit of money.
But then again, with the rise of ChatGPT and similar fire hazards, my concerns are now that instead of looking things up, kids will be happy with the first thing those LLMs say.
For now, I hope the GBA and N64 games I put in there make him happy. If he figures out the controls that’s already a win for me.
Honestly, I want kids today to still have a sense of wonder for what technology can do, I want them to know that programs and applications are more than a black box where you just put things in and stuff comes out. So, I’ll try to still keep an eye on what my friend does, and hope the kid shows more interest in computers, FOSS and retro gaming!
