Into Networking and Tinkering with Windows

It started when I was around 13–14 years old, and I was introduced to another laptop. It was from HP, with an i3 4th gen CPU and Intel HD Graphics 4400 iGPU, and it came with Windows 8.1. That laptop was where I actually managed to learn the most. It is still kept at my home and turns on, though it has hinge issues. But life decided to give me problems, and I decided to solve them (somehow). My parents (who were typical Indian/Asian parents, by the way) were already aware that I used the PC to play games, and learn computer stuffs too. But to them, it was apparently a waste of time because it wasn't something which schools taught or wasn't in the syllabus, as I was supposed to focus on my studies (because I was average in some subjects).

So, what they did was create an administrator account and a user account, and I was handed the user account—meaning I could not install games unless I knew the administrator password, which they never shared with me. But I somehow managed to get a privilege escalation through the sethc.exe password reset method (that is where I learned how to boot into a USB, lol). So, I did a password reset of the administrator account, but I got caught a couple of hours later, got scolded, and they changed the password again.

I did not give up there, as it became a war for me that I definitely wanted to win . I looked things up on the internet, went onto the dark web, and found an ISO that could bypass the Windows administrator password for one time only. So, I booted from that ISO, made my user account an admin, and installed games on it . They never cross-checked whether my account was an admin or a normal user, so I was fine for a long time until they caught me playing games again and changed the Wi-Fi password. But I managed to connect through WPS; in the worst-case scenario, I would have just pressed the reset button, but that circumstance never came. All these events, one by one, led me to learn something new . I was already a curious kid when it came to computers, so I did not stop exploring; I did various experiments like opening SMB ports, configuring routers, etc . I learned all of them at that age.