I've messed with computers since high school days (when I took a class in IBM Card Punch), in college (on a Xerox Sigma 6), and in graduate school (where I was truly introduced to the personal computer). Along the way I've taught myself machine language for the 6502 (Apple II and Commodore 64), Basic, Pascal, C++, Visual Basic for Applications, and a smattering of other develoment tools.
My last triumph was in building a computer. Actually, I took an old ThinkCentre case and power supply, and bought a new motherboard, processor, memory, and a SATA hard drive. I also bought a CPU fan. Not knowing for sure what I was seeing in the pictures I got a monster that fills the case. But the fan is large enough that it doesn't make much noise, so this is the quietest desktop computer I've ever worked with.
I serve some informal IT roles at my job. Just yesterday (as I write, of course) I reached my wits end with a computer that was infected with porn-related spyware. So I installed a new hard drive (still need to install the user's label printer), copied his "My Documents folder from the old one, and set him loose with instructions on how to lock out the computer.
I've developed a number of tools for use at work, the most utilized of which is the timesheet database. I linked it in to the employee database so when Human Resources adds an employee that data is immediately available to the accounting clerk who keys in the time entries.
We recently "upgraded" from Office 2000, 2003 to Office 2007. Of course it can take a while to learn a new interface, and the interface of Office 2007 is almost totally different from that of the earlier versions. But I've run into difficulties that seem to be related to the product trying to be too cute for the equpment it runs on. So here's an opinion article on the trouble's facing the company with a near monopoly on PC operating systems.
I may mention it in the article, but one possibility is that Microsoft has been relying on ever faster computers with more memory and storage capacity. But the PC platform has reached a plateau of sorts. Processor speeds haven't increased much since about 2004. Most motherboards still only allow up to 4 GB of ram. If Microsoft added the amount of complexity and additional code that they've been used to adding over a given period of time, then the peformance wall Office 2007 seems to run into in some cases could be explained.
I'll probably add to this over time.