Same thing happened to me a few years ago. My old laptop from 2013 is hardware incompatible with something in modern Windows10 and when it tried installing the late 2019 update it just died. Had to buy a new laptop to keep working.
Today, that same laptop is happily running Arch Linux. I’m still trying to decide what I’ll do with the main gaming PC.
Demonoid, absolutely! Warez-bb, and many oldschool GeoCities blogs. I remember one that had portable cracks of any programs you could imagine.