booting up your 2010 laptop may cause extreme nostalgia
a look into my teenage self from the contents of my 10+ year old Dell laptop
I paid $26.98 for a new charger and battery for my old Dell Inspiron laptop that I had from the ages of around 13 to 18. I remembered when I first got it as a gift from my parents, I was so excited, no more fighting with my brother for time on the family computer! I could finally spend hours on end doing whatever I wanted online. What I was most looking to revisit were the old stop motion music videos that I made for YouTube and privated when I was in high school because of the haters. I regret doing that because in 2012 when google made you have to link your email to youtube in order to log in, I wasn’t able to access my account anymore. Thus the idea to revive my old laptop was planted.
Lately I’ve been a little obsessed with nostalgia, digging into my past to make sense of my present. I’ve been writing a lot about my younger self, and rediscovering old relics has been surprisingly illuminating. If you’ve read my other posts, you might be sick of it by now—but hey, I can’t help what’s inspiring me lately!
When I booted up my laptop and the password screen appeared, I paused. I typed in my current macbook password, thinking it would be the same. But no, incorrect password.. shit. I clicked reset password and an error message telling me I needed a floppy disk to reset appeared. That made me feel old as hell. I tried about 20 more times with variations of what I thought the password could be to no avail. Dejected, I decided try again in the morning. When I was laying in bed that night it came to me, the password popped into my head like a repressed memory resurfacing. A variation I hadn’t tried, and I knew it was the one.
That next morning I opened up the ancient tech, typed in the password I hadn’t used in over 10 years, and my desktop appeared! The background lit up with the saying “stay flawless like a unicorn” okay queen. The first thing I did was go to the “videos” tab. I was hoping for a few old music videos, but what I found was a treat. There were so many videos that I had forgotten about making! But also ones I could never forget. Like the iconic stop motion to the song “United States of Pop.” Remember those mashups? Somehow 4chan got ahold of that video so I remember it racked up a good amount of views, and even more hate comments from teen boys. My first haters :’’).
Here’s a lil clip from said video, I couldn’t talk about it without giving y’all at least a little context lol. I feel like I’m at the age where I think these videos are more funny/endearing than embarrassing anymore. If you were on youtube in the 2000s/2010s you would have seen many “music videos” like this from creators such as JennXPenn, Ricky Dillon, Andrea Russet, and Supermac18. And those are just off the top of my head..it was a huge trend I swear! I was born in 1995 so I always thought I was on the cusp of gen z and millennial, but looking back at what I was doing as a teen makes me think I’m definitely 100% millennial. I mean look at that side part lol.
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I remember when I would edit these videos my laptop would overheat almost immediately, and crash every 10 minutes. Apparently windows movie maker couldn’t handle the 100 pictures I’d upload in order to do a stop motion, or I just desperately needed a new battery. I’m not sure how I had the patience to redo an edit that many times, must have been the love of the craft. It’s funny because I would never put up with that now, I get mad when anything tech takes even a second too long to load. Convenience culture strikes again babyyy. Anyway, back then, when I finally moved my laptop from my stomach after hours of editing, there would be a heat rash every time. No pain no gain I guess.
Maybe the best discovery from my old laptop were the random webcam videos. It felt like taking a peak into my everyday life back then, green Pantech cell phone and all. Most of them were singing videos, which I won’t add here because frankly that would be too embarrassing, even for me. But I can tell you I covered songs such as Yellow by Coldplay, Someone Like You by Adele, and Lucky by Daft Punk (I know), all on my older brother’s acoustic guitar that he left behind when he went to college.
In lieu of my singing videos heres a cute clip of a convo with my mom and I planning to watch a movie in her room. Not sure why I was recording, but it’s so trippy to watch my teenage self talk. I feel like my voice is way different now? It’s weirdly hard to see that girl as a younger version of me and not just a totally different person. It’s like some sort of cognitive dissonance. Like my brain is so used to how I look now that it somehow can’t understand it’s me I’m watching. Or maybe I’m just experiencing nostalgia and the bittersweet feeling that brings. Also, on a completely separate note, I can’t believe my parents let me put up all those magazine pages on my wall. I remember when I finally took them down it took half the paint with it because I used duct tape lol.
When I dug deeper into the contents of my old laptop I found the gifs that I used to make for tumblr on photoshop. These I actually think are cool still, so here are some of my favorites:
As you can see I really like music videos lol.
If you happen to have an old laptop collecting dust somewhere, I highly recommend firing it up and seeing what’s inside. I almost told my mom to toss mine many times, but I’m so glad she didn’t. Revisiting those files felt like unearthing a corrupted hard drive of my own brain. Like I stepped into my teenage self and recovered memories from digital extinction (ok matrix vibes). It also reminded me how important our early hobbies and fixations can be. Sometimes the niche stuff we were into as teens holds clues about who we really are, or who we still want to be.
thanks for reading! sorry I took a week off, I wanted to spend extra time on this post tbh <3
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see ya next week!
obsessed with this post. I was too embarrassed to take videos like this when I was a kid bc all we had was the family computer and I so badly wish I had some to look back on
My paternal grandparents recorded important life moments from 1993 Christmas (I would have been 1) until I was in college. It's...honestly lovely and bizarre to see.