Amazon order

1      "Sony PS2 Console - Slim PS2"
1      "Alien Hominid"
1      "Kingdom Hearts"
2      "Sony Playstation 8MB Memory Card"
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Total for this order:               $1.38

All things considered, I would classify that as a pretty good deal - made possible through the use of Christmas Amazon vouchers that we had never got around to using. The only trouble is that while placing the order I realized that the PS2 is now just a generation short of becoming 'retro', and that makes me feel (not for the first time in the last week thanks to visiting St Andrews) terribly, terribly old. I sort of miss the PS2 from home, as when I'm on my PC I find myself constantly working on things - that and I don't get the chance to keep up with Soul Calibur 3, meaning that my brother thrashes me at it every time. But for now, Whitney has recommended Alien Hominid, and I am taking a risk with Kingdom Hearts which is apparently quite good and not hideously girly at all. (Especially when you consider the alternative was Final Fantasy X2.)

My PC has obviously picked up on the hint that I may be actually buying games now rather than pirating them and playing them on it, so it's decided to go into a huff. After delaying it for ages I finally tried to install Service Pack 2 recently with the assumption that it might not be as bad as last time I tried it, and instead of installing it just gave me an unhelpful "Cannot install" message and exited. It seems that SP2 didn't bother to restore any files it had messed with so far, though, and now Outlook Express will not start up at all because of missing DLL files.

This was easily solved through downloading Thunderbird instead, taking myself a further step away from using Microsoft software, but I'm fairly confident that I'm now in a situation where my computer won't come back up after resetting it, so I'm backing up the hard drive just in case. Actually I looked around for free backup software and couldn't find any that weren't awful, so I've set it to just RAR the entire hard drive and put it on my external drive instead. Twenty-four hours into the operation, it should be just about finishing.

So I think I'll have to reinstall - it was about time the whole thing was cleaned up, to be honest.