Windows PCs & Support

Microsoft Windows, or Windows is the trademark pertaining to a family of graphical user interface based operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft and their partners worldwide. The modern offering of Windows is represented by Windows 10 for PCs and Windows Server 2019 for servers. There are also versions that have been superseded such as Windows 7 & 8 and versions for mobile phones that did not succeed in competition with the open sourced based offerings of Google and Apple.

Desktop Support for the PC

Many of the issues faced by users on a daily basis are actually to do with applications running on top of Microsoft Windows or hardware devices that have been installed into Windows and have proprietary software which enable them to run, often referred to as 'drivers.' For software support on applications such as Microsoft Office, please have a look at our software support page.

Hardware problems such as problems with devices and peripherals come in various flavours and you can use this link to find out more about recovering your system if you are unable to boot your system.

Origins of Windows and OSX

The earliest versions of Windows were actually in development before the Apple Macintosh was ever released but Apple did already have the Lisa which was an earlier GUI system, based heavily on the Xerox PARC which was not released to market, but was very popular in Universities and used across the Xerox enterprise throughout the US. These early versions of Windows (versions 1 & 2) are more commonly thought of as shells nowadays as they were not a true OS (operating system) as we think of them now, they ran on top of another Disk OS or DOS (disk operating system)

Popularisation of the GUI

The widespread adoption of the PC in homes and small business popularized computers amongst people without any formal computer-based training. This quickly created a growing market with openings and opportunities for commercial exploitation. Easy-to-use interfaces unlocking the potential of home and business systems lead to massive investment, and many refinements quickly made the Windows OS GUI a popular choice everywhere.

A Demand for Visuals

As the GUI increased in popularity, so did the requirement for computers to be able to provide High-color and True Color capabilities, using display adapters providing thousands and millions of colors. Along with this came faster CPUs and accelerated graphic cards, cheaper RAM and storage devices quickly rising from megabytes to gigabytes. The gradual adoption of the Internet in homes quickly gave rise to an environment in which the common user was suddenly able to run complicated GUIs and one where they began to favor feature-rich desktop command processes and prefer windows background wallpapers and other graphics-based aesthetics.

The Expansion of the Desktop

Once the desktop PC has made its way into many homes across the US and Europe, people at home began to experiment with what they could do. Many home activities like listening to music, music and graphics creation, and home device integration began to tumble in price because people wrote simple softwares to allow these activities and distributed these softwares for nothing.

Once these cheap or free softwares began to find their way into many homes, companies began buying the rights to the software and releasing updates to force users to pay or cease using the software. The age of software licensing was upon us and would persist.