This was me when my dad would use limewire, break the family PC, and blame me because I was playing “those video games”.

Me: using safe browsing practices and only downloading from trusted sources

My Mom: downloading every toolbar in existence

My Mom: "You broke the computer!"

Early pirating was like playing the lottery.

Will I get the good version of a song or a weird remix?

Will the media play or be some unrecognized format?

What's making my pc run so slow?

Or in the 90s, finding the Windows directory, “there’s a lot of stuff in here, I bet I can free up a lot of space”

This hurts. I still remember when I rendered our first family PC unbootable. It was a Pentium II 266 with a tiny 3GB HDD running Windows 98, and apparently some sub folder of system32 seemed a good place to start doing some clean up to win back some extra space.

Turns out, it wasn't.

Now turns have tabled and I'm the stereotypical IT professional who helps out fixing PCs/smartphones

And now I fix all the home PCs.

Oh god, this was me back when I was a kid (thankfully it was never permanently ruined). I also hid all my secret downloads in system32 so nobody would find them.

This is how I got so good at computer IT stuff as a kid. Had to constantly clear our family computer of viruses and reinstall windows multiple times a year because my brothers would always download shit like “The fast and the furious-no-virus.mpg.exe”

My god man. This brings back a traumatic memory of me bricking my now brother-in-laws PC by trying to torrent a cracked version of counter strike. I was young and dumb and panicked. Entire hard drive was wiped without chance to backup. 😩

Me and my little sister downloading minecraft mods and getting malware

This hits young me learning linux and dual booting straight in the feels. I can't even begin to count the amount of times I totally wrecked the family computer and had to reinstall windows from scratch.

I'm in IT and luckily I never had to deal with this. Now if they had a card that said "So you've bricked the company server" then that would be me.

Mid 2000s? Say wut? I think lImewire was dead by the mid 2000s?

More like 2000-2002 just downloaded a pirated new movie only to realize the file was mislabeled and it wasn't what I was expecting and now I have to go ham on the hard drive with 00 buck shot.

Thats my super power, there was no family PC. It was my PC.

Limewire, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy and eDonkey! The first two were so risky!

Once you figure out how to reinstall Windows XP your family and neighbors will think you're a computer god.

The amount of money I wasted using printer ink for "educational jpgs" when I had the house to myself.. I'm so sorry, my parents (90's dinosaur)

That needs to be a BearShare logo for me lol

eMule

That's where you could find everything!