On the screen, the file sat innocently enough on the desktop: windows_xp_sp3.wim . It was huge, nearly four gigabytes, which was monstrous for the era. Elias hadn’t downloaded it from the internet. He had found it on a dusty, unmarked external hard drive he’d bought for five dollars at a estate sale three towns over. The seller had looked relieved to be rid of it.

: Using Sysprep before capturing the WIM allows the image to be "generalized" and deployed to different sets of hardware without immediate blue-screen errors. How to Create and Use a WIM for XP