SAME! I was cleaning out an old laptop I found at my parent's house last month so it could be recycled (truly too old for anyone to do anything with and not unique enough to keep around as something for nostalgia) and after waiting an eternity for the slow as fuck HDD to spin to life, I was greeted by Windows XP and a bunch of memories, including DaemonTools and other ISO/cloning stuff. Truly took me back in time to high school.

I do not know why I needed this stuff on my mom's laptop, but I assume I was either installing pirated software on her machine (honestly, that is the most likely reason) or I was trying to troubleshoot stuff and her CD/ DVD drive wasn’t working for some reason. One thing is for certain, she did not put it there! I made her move to a Mac in 2009 or 2010 before I would do any more computer repair for her, so it was truly a blast from the past.

(Unrelated aside, my father refuses to use a Mac and if I gave him a Linux laptop, he’d literally just go buy something overpriced and covered in adware at Best Buy and get scammed into some antivirus subscription, so I begrudgingly had to start agreeing to service his laptop again after he fell for a ransomware scam the second time, not to mention the fact that I got a job at Microsoft sort of made my “no Windows tech support” rule feel wrong (even tho I worked on Linux at Microsoft and had a corporate-issued Mac.) Thankfully, Windows is much easier for me to deal with these days and I’ve set up his machine so I can ssh into it remotely if I have to. )