The Tenfold Hack

12-year-old Ethan finds a way to make his old computer play the latest games

Ethan was twelve, with a mop of unruly brown hair and a secondhand laptop that wheezed like an old dog. His parents, both teachers, weren’t stingy—they just didn’t see the point in upgrading a computer that “still worked.” Ethan’s pleas for a new rig to run his favorite game, StarForge, fell on deaf ears. “It’s fine for schoolwork,” his mom said. “Games don’t need fancy hardware,” his dad added. Ethan, however, wasn’t just playing games. He was tinkering, coding, and dreaming of virtual worlds that his clunky machine couldn’t handle.


One rainy Saturday, stuck in his room, Ethan decided he’d had enough. If his parents wouldn’t upgrade his laptop, he’d make it feel like they had. He’d been reading about processor optimization on forums, where coders swapped tricks to squeeze more juice out of old hardware. Most of it was over his head, but he caught the gist: computers waste a lot of power on redundant tasks. Maybe he could fix that.


Ethan started small, digging into his laptop’s task manager. He noticed dozens of background processes hogging resources—antivirus scans, system updates, browser tabs he’d forgotten about. He wrote a simple script to pause non-essential tasks when StarForge was running. The game ran smoother, but not by much. He needed more.


Late at night, fueled by soda and determination, Ethan stumbled across a research paper on parallel processing. It talked about how CPUs split tasks into threads but often left cores idle because of poor scheduling. Ethan didn’t understand all the math, but he got the idea: his quad-core processor wasn’t being used efficiently. He wondered if he could force it to spread work evenly across all cores, like dealing cards to players.


Using Python, Ethan cobbled together a program he called “CoreBuster.” It intercepted the operating system’s task scheduler and reassigned threads dynamically, ensuring no core sat idle. He tested it with StarForge. The game, which usually chugged at 20 frames per second, hit a buttery 60. Ethan whooped, waking his dog. He’d done it—his laptop felt like a beast.


But CoreBuster was greedy. It didn’t just optimize StarForge. It made everything faster—video rendering, file compression, even his math homework simulations. Ethan ran benchmarks he found online. His laptop, a five-year-old budget model, was performing like a high-end gaming PC. He posted about it on a tech forum, expecting a few likes. Instead, the thread exploded.


“Kid, you’ve reinvented kernel-level scheduling,” one user wrote. “This is insane,” said another. Ethan didn’t get the fuss. He’d just wanted to play his game. He shared CoreBuster’s code, thinking others might find it useful. Within days, hobbyists were testing it on everything from old PCs to data-center servers. A YouTuber ran it on a decade-old netbook and rendered 4K video in half the usual time. Another user claimed it cut their cloud computing bill by 80%.


Ethan’s parents noticed the buzz when his forum post hit their social media feeds. “Is this our Ethan?” his mom asked, squinting at the screen. They sat him down, worried he’d hacked something illegal. Ethan shrugged. “I just made my laptop faster.” His dad, who taught history, not tech, called a friend who worked in IT. The friend’s jaw dropped when he saw CoreBuster’s code. “This kid’s sitting on a gold mine,” he said. “He’s basically multiplied computing power without touching the hardware.”


Tech blogs picked up the story. “12-Year-Old’s Hack Boosts CPU Efficiency Tenfold,” one headline read. Companies reached out, offering Ethan internships, licensing deals, even scholarships. A startup claimed CoreBuster could revolutionize AI training, slashing costs for massive models. Ethan didn’t care about any of that. He was just happy his laptop could run StarForge’s new expansion pack.


His parents finally caved and bought him a new computer, but Ethan barely used it. He was too busy tweaking CoreBuster, still oblivious to the fact that his little fix was quietly reshaping the tech world. “It’s not a big deal,” he told a reporter. “Anyone could’ve done it.” The reporter just laughed.