She’d discovered WinToUSB months earlier while helping her father recover an old laptop that refused to boot. The tool had felt like a magician’s trick—take a Windows image, point it to an ordinary USB drive, and suddenly the stubborn machine would breathe again. It felt like reclaiming time: reinstallations done on a thumb drive, diagnostics performed without reinstalling every dependency, the convenience of carrying an entire workspace in her pocket. For someone moving between client sites and part-time classes, it was the closest thing to lightness she’d found.