Turns out you don't have to be popular to receive tons of spam messages in your guestbook from bots - over the last few hours alone I have received over 20. So I have implemented a couple of ways to stop them, one of which you might experience yourself - a simple math question - we all know clankers can't math, right? Other measures won't affect real people. On a brighter note, I have assembled the junk PC I was writing about below - it's running a Phenom II and Win7, and it's awesome - I have been piling old games onto the SDD, so far I've got L4D, Metro 2033, the first 2 Stalkers, Borderlands, HL2, HoMMIII, Stronghold, Syberia, Assassin's Creed 2, Skyrim, Vice City, San Andreas, LotR BfME2, LotR Conquest (hell yeah!), Spider-Man 2, the first three Harry Potter games, No One Lives Forever 2, American McGee's Alice and NFS Underground 2. So far I was unable to make LEGO Stunt Rally work - it runs, but the cars don't. I have had some problems running Prototype - it crashes as it loads a saved game, but otherwise runs. I'll try to debug as much as possible. Voodoo isn't always the solution.

I have managed to get a retro PC together, but there are 2 main issues with it currently - the HDD is very slow, and XP (even with the latest community driven updates) is too outdated to be realistically useful for gaming. Hence, I will do 2 things - first, I will install XP on an SSD and check the responsiveness of the system; second, I will likely just install a version of Windows 7 on the SSD. I was focusing on XP for nostalgia, which I have somewhat satisfied using the system again, and for Lego Stunt Rally, for which I have found an alternative loader that supposedly works on newer Windows versions

I have been thinking about playing the good old games again. I should clarify that my childhood/adolescence gaming era was in the '00s - '10s, so that's what I feel most nostalgic about. I used to have an NES clone with cartridges, but here I'm talking about PC games specifically. I should also say that my favourite games were mostly not the ones that are generally popular. I had a lot of games that were based on movies and cartoons - like Madagascar, the Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter games, or the second Shrek - and some random ones, the demos of which I had got with the local monthly gaming magazine - like Giants: Citizen Kabuto or No One Lives Forever 2. I also remember random games - like Lego Stunt Rally and Creatures: Village - that I had bought from the local CD store. A lot of these games don't run on modern PCs unless you voodoo them into running through emulators, VMs, graphics cards sims &c. And that kind of voodooing leads to bugs, animations are too fast because CPUs are faster now, and in general it takes some of the magic away. So, I have found my old motherboard with Phenom II still in it, along with the cooler and RAM. I have an old Internet card and a graphics card from that time, which supports DirectX 9 (sorry, didn't meant to flex on you). Basically, I only need a hard drive, a power unit and a case to shove it all into, and I get a somewhat 'retro' PC for Windows XP. I also have an old VGA LCD display, which would also be nice to use for the build. I think I also have an internal CD drive somewhere, I know I have an external one and an external floppy drive. Anyway, I'll let that thought cook in my brain for a bit, purely because that setup needs space in the flat, and I'm not sure I want to allocate it just yet. I'll let it simmer