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In my circle of friends and family, I've always been known as the "computer guy". You know the person--the one who provides free 24-hour tech support and gets called for every little problem involving everything from forgotten email passwords to solutions on defeating bosses in first-person shooter games. To them, I'm a computer god, but the truth is, that I am more of a power-user than a computer repair guy. Now in my elite circle of computer nerds, I'm nowhere near the expert that everyone else believes. I have friends who can boggle my brain in almost any category, and that even includes computer hardware.
Who can keep up with all the new processors, GPUs (aren't these video cards?), motherboards, when there's so many "next generation" items being created all the time? Why just yesterday my computer repair expert was surprised by the power supply requirements of a new high-end video processor. Now, I can forgive my family for asking me about RAM, and hard-drive space, and what they need to have in order to play the latest Tomb Raider game, but if they really knew what it takes to stay up-to-date in the computer industry, they'd be showering me with free dinners (that's the standard charge for a housecall).
Learning how to fix a leaky pipe takes some training, but once you've learned that trade, you know that over the years that pipes aren't going to change much. Sure, they will make pipes out of different materials, and in different sizes, but the general properties of pipes will remain the same. However, when it comes to building or repairing computers, you really need to stay sharp, because one month you'll be playing Tomb Raider on your optimized quad core PC, and the next month, you'll have the slowest machine at the next LAN. But will your friends understand the difference? Probably not, as long as you can restore their Hotmail account.
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