• oatmilkmaid@possumpat.ioEnglish
    82·
    11 months ago

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

    • Bonehead@kbin.social
      622·
      11 months ago

      This is just it. I used limewire for years and never got a virus. I was also not stupid enough to download “Brittany.Spears.Nude.Totally.Legit.Movie.avi.exe”. It amazes me how completely blind some people are.

      • buwho@lemmy.mlEnglish
        11·
        11 months ago

        I was like 11 and had no idea wth i was doing. but i sure downloaded a lot of stuff from Limewire…“why the hell is the computer so slow all of a sudden?!”

  • Jim@lemm.eeEnglish
    47·
    11 months ago

    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?

    • veroxii@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      11 months ago

      I remember running the 2 command line McAfee scan and clean commands. And it would tell you scanning for 15 known viruses or something lol. Then it became hundreds and eventually just changed into the tsr apps running in the background all the time.

      Generally just booting from a clean disk with clean on it would make you the PC repair god.

  • BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    33·
    11 months ago

    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”

  • happyhippo@feddit.itEnglish
    24·
    11 months ago

    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

  • Kratos@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • DogMuffinsEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Oh man. Fucking around with config.bat having NFI what it did.

  • Ado@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    11 months ago

    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. 😩

    • filgas08@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      not much use but you can actually still access files if they weren’t written upon since they are still there and only the address was destroyed. I did it once after accidentally wiping my hard drive and managed to get quite a lot of stuff back.

  • CheesyGordita@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    11 months ago

    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”

  • Durpadurp@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • danafest@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • DragonAce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    11 months ago

    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.