Hi, my name is Gary Woodruff.  I actually worked with my first computer in my first year of College in 1972. It was called a mainframe and took up two floors of the ENAD (Engineering Administration) computer science building. It required keypunch cards. Accuracy was important as holes were physically punched in a card and you had to start over if you made a mistake or got the cards out of order. Two years later I moved up to another mainframe that only took up one room and used paper tape instead of cards. This much-easier-to-use computer actually got me hooked on computers.

Computers have been improving ever since graduating from College. My first home computer was a Coleco Adam. Supposedly a toy, but I managed to get it to run several business programs that I wrote and used extensively. Computers have been a part of both my work and play ever since. I spent several years using Laser Apple compatible and Apple computers. I missed the DOS period on the IBM side and have had a bad accent when speaking DOS ever since.  (DOS means Disk Operating System and it was the text based predecessor to Windows)

I started with Windows 3.11 in 1991 when I changed jobs and the new company was IBM compatible based. Windows 95 came and went and I discovered the Microsoft Newsgroups when a problem occurred upgrading to Windows 98. Those at the Newsgroups helped me through my troubles that day, and continued to help and teach me better than any other method I had found. (Newsgroups are places where folks could and can ask questions and get answers just in an earlier format than the web forums like Computer Haven.) Those Newsgroups started me on the road to helping others with computer problems. That first problem led to my writing an article on upgrading to Windows 98 and later articles on upgrading to Millennium Edition and Windows XP. An article on the Windows XP Files and Settings Transfer Wizard is my latest. Both subjects will likely see future articles from my keyboard. You can see these articles here. http://aumha.org/gary.htm

I was awarded the Microsoft MVP Award the first day of 2000 and have received 4 more since then. I met Patty MacDuffie and many other good friends through the MVP Program and it has been a very good experience for me. I am now active in two web forums, with the newest and friendliest being Computer Haven. Hopefully those coming here will find this place as educational, helpful and yes, entertaining, as I found the old Newsgroups in their hay day. This forum reminds me greatly of those early Newsgroups and that is a very good thing.