About

Once upon a time, Windows Wally was just Wally, the kid who spent all his time in the garage rewiring circuit boards and scribbling code on the floor in chalk.  The neighborhood kids made fun of him, called him an eccentric weirdo, but the neighborhood adults knew better: most of them had Wally on speed dial.

Indeed, every parent on the block had a story to tell about Wally’s prowess with a PC. Script error? Call Wally. Screen frozen? Better call Wally. Can’t install the new version of Windows? Better be safe and just call the kid. Popular computer retailers in the area noticed their business dwindling. Why didn’t anyone come in anymore? Wally’s own dad started affectionately calling his boy “Windows,” and the nickname stuck.

But Wally’s success didn’t happen overnight. It was evident from the very beginning that Wally was something of a PC prodigy, the “Mozart of the motherboards”. When he was nine, he took apart all of the wall phones (remember those?) in his house and rewired those together to form what many experts believe to be the first homemade dial-up Internet connection.  (After he did that, the doorbell to his house rang like a phone, while the phones were controlled by the dining room light switch. It wasn’t a perfect system.) He built his first fully functioning word processor when he was 13.

But lying at the heart of his early accomplishments was a simple desire to help. Wally’s parents couldn’t get him out of his garage workshop for dinner, but if a neighbor called with a PC problem Wally would be at their door faster than you could say “Bill Gates.” No problem was too small for Wally’s attention. He genuinely enjoyed helping people troubleshoot their Windows computer problems.

That’s why, on the day that Wally graduated from college, he got a phone call from Microsoft offering him a job as a Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP). Wally, ever the PC fan, grilled the Microsoft folks for an hour about the intricacies of the newest Windows operating system, just to make sure the call wasn’t a practical joke from one of his buddies in the computer lab. It wasn’t, and Wally went to work for Microsoft the next Monday morning.

His first decision: start a blog. He’d heard too many complaints from people saying that it was impossible to find easy-to-understand solutions to common Windows tech problems on the Internet. He knew he’d be just the man for the job, and he vowed to field every tech question asked of him.  At that moment, “WindowsWally.com” was born and the rest is history.

Things have changed since Wally was just the helpful neighborhood kid, going door-to-door and solving PC problems. But they haven’t changed much. If you have a question for Windows Wally, ask him on his blog and he’ll make sure to respond promptly. He’s here to answer any of your Windows tech support problems, no matter how small. He knows Windows can be frustrating for the average PC user, but he’s anything but average. Windows is his nickname, for Pete’s sake!