HP Compaq nc6400

secondhand prices are shit, the eternal dream of buying a 1TB+ external hard drive is still a myth and my main computer is filled to the brim with ephemeral bullshit, so this is my already outdated solution for digital anime downloads; an old HP Compaq running Windows XP.

this thing actually has a decent amount of backstory behind it. my grandmother from my dad's side gifted it to me an indeterminate amount of time ago (i don't think i was any older than like... 12) but it eventually ended up staying with my dad after i left it on all night in order to not lose the progress i'd made with him while watching Akira, and from then it "burned out" supposedly (i think i remember that it wouldn't turn on, but i also "burnt out" another laptop of his that in reality just had a fucked up Windows install so take that with a grain of salt) which rendered it useless so i just left it at his place.

a few years afterwards, i come back to find out that he's... completely taken over the laptop. he fixed it, and his at-the-time girlfriend had installed Windows 7 on it. which, considering this is a laptop with 1GB of RAM, went as well as you'd expect. he didn't really care though; even if it ran like shit, all the laptop really needed to be was a good way to access Cuevana3 and whatever other fuckass pirated movie sites are used in my region. i can't remember how long the laptop spent in Windows 7 purgatory, but it must have been 3+ years. the worst thing that happened to it while under his care was spilling Pepsi all over the keyboard, which means that typing on it feels absolutely disgusting once the laptop gets hot enough for the keys to get sticky.

he left it behind once he moved to Spain though, and it naturally fell to me, considering in the final months of its time with him i was using it more than he was. and from there it went through a few changes; originally i was planning to dualboot LUbuntu and XP on it, but after realizing just how fucking bad even a version of Ubuntu meant for systems like these ran on this thing, i gave up and just went for a full XP install. originally i was planning to use the apparent 64-bit version of XP that i'd only just learnt existed (because it would be cooler that way, obviously) but after all of the most important drivers refused to work and after i fucked the OS by messing with its registry settings, i gave up and settled for Windows XP Professional SP3.

here's a screenshot of what the desktop looks like, as of the writing of this page (may 4th, 2025).

the actual digital collection of anime is ironically probably the least interesting part about this laptop, so i'll get it out of the way first.

i wanted to actually use Windows's default "My Documents" folders since i've never actually done that on a computer before, so i plopped my anime folder in My Pictures and began downloading. as of right now, the folder is at 82.8GB; roughly 54% of the 150GB HDD is just occupied by anime!

and here's the collection itself. while a big motivation behind the way i use this laptop is the idea of getting myself into the mindset of a time-period accurate otaku, i started to see it less as a hard rule and more a loose guideline once i realized how inconvenient so much old software really is, which is why my selection doesn't discriminate. every single video file present here is in 720p; my philosophy when i first started this was that with how middling this screen resolution is, i could theoretically get away with 720p for most anime without much issue which would allow me to massively save on filesize. though it's become incredibly obvious as time has gone on that for digital downloads, 720p is only really acceptable if it's being watched through a CRT; the difference between 720 and 1080 even on an 800p screen is massive, mainly coming through in screenshots but being an improvement especially in the way of bitrate (i'm not an expert on this though, so take my words with a grain of salt). that, and the fact that i only have 12GB of space left on this PC already means that even if i do have things to add to the collection (Hi Score Girl I, II and Extra, Bleach TYBW's 3 seasons) it's not really worth the effort. every single anime here was downloaded using Hakuneko with Animepahe as a source, with the exception of Dragon Ball Z Kai which was downloaded using Senpwai in order to get the dub.

(sidenote: sorry for the date-and-time related shenanigans all throughout, the internal clock battery died a few months back.)

i'll be honest that's as far as "hoarding" really goes on this laptop but this is my self-indulgence website so i'm gonna spend the rest of this page talking about the other stuff i have on here.

the fast and loose rule of using this laptop like a time period accurate otaku would plays much more into the rest of this laptop. scouring websites like zerochan among others for old wallpapers has been fun; the low screen resolution has allowed me to use many pieces official or otherwise that would be too blurry to use on my 1080p display. if i eventually get around to writing the separate page i wanted to dedicate to old wallpapers, you'll see a link to it here.

games are the other big thing that this laptop has, even if its hardware is a bit lacking. i was in a TYPE-MOON kick when i first got my hands on this thing back in late february, so i have Tsukihime, Tsukihime PLUS+DISC, Kagetsu Tohya, and the three Fate stay/night Realta Nua routes. those last two were actually kinda hard to get; Tsukihime is as simple as just grabbing the .iso off of somewhere like MyAbandonware and applying the mirror moon english patch (same as PLUS+DISC if i remember correctly) but i had to scour to get versions of Fate and KT that hadn't retroactively become incompatible with their original hardware due to being made to work on modern versions of Windows. my memories of procuring these two are a bit fuzzy since it's been a while and... well, to be frank my memory is just really fucking bad, but i remember that the Ultimate Edition patch's installer is incompatible for systems below Windows 8. i could've probably just gotten the game set up on my desktop and then transferred its files over to the Compaq but i... honestly think it's better this way? UE is a cool patch all things considered but unifying all 3 routes into one executable is kinda lame and actively working towards bringing back the eroscenes isn't something i was thrilled about doing (no offense meant for the people who think the game is better with them present, it's just not what i'm looking for out of these games). i sincerely do not remember even a little bit of the story behind this install of Kagetsu Tohya, though. and in the end, all of this effort... for nothing, since my TYPE-MOON hyperfixation is well and truly over and if i do end up playing another of their VNs it'll probably be Witch on the Holy Night anyway.

well, atleast future Noc will thank me for installing these since it'll mean she won't have to go through the effort whenever the time comes she wants to see what the deal with FS/N really is.

technically that's not where the TYPE-MOON on this system ends, though, since i also have Melty Blood Act Cadenza and Actress Again Current Code on here. MBAACC was the whole reason why i got into Tsukihime and Kara no Kyoukai to begin with, plus it's one of my favourite fighting games ever made, so having that was a given (even if the English translation i had to use is supposedly incomplete and the game kinda runs poorly when certain VFX are on the screen, like HEAT mode. Cadenza is on here too because i originally wanted to have the first 3 games (Re-ACT, Act Cadenza, Actress Again Current Code) all together but not only did i fail at installing the Re-ACT patch but i also found out that if you play that game on an Xbox 360 pad, you're not allowed to use the D-Pad. so that was a bust. i still have yet to actually get into Act Cadenza; i don't imagine it's too different from AACC and the fact that my main (Ryougi) isn't in that game at all is a bit annoying, but i have it so i should probably give it a go sometime. i wanna get some other period-accurate fighters on here too, eventually; Hinokakera has always looked mad interesting, and even though the GOG versions of Guilty Gear XX Reload and KOF2002UM that i've tried don't actually work on XP, i should probably be able to get some older releases of those two games to work on this thing. even if i don't have anyone to play with, having portable versions of these fighting games that i can play without having to deal with the fuckass "D-Pad" present on my Switch sounds amazing.

in that same vein, i also have FinalBurn NEO on here; i sincerely didn't think i was gonna be able to get a working version, but i managed. since arcade ROMs are lightweight, i've got a pretty big game selection;

most of these are pretty obvious picks, but what can i say, i'm a simple bitch at my core. besides, even if they are obvious, that doesn't mean they're not good; playing SVC Chaos, KOF99, MSlugX and 3S and the rest of my FBNeo library is probably the most use i've gotten out of this thing (beyond watching anime, ofc).

Stepmania 3.9 is the thing that i got the most use out of with this laptop back before it was mine, though back then i was running dozens of different versions thanks to the absurd amounts of time i spent browsing the Stepmania Archive, mainly focusing on 3.9 and nITG (without actually using any modfiles though. i was treating it like oITG because i could never get oITG working right.)

the reason why i spent so long with Stepmania practically explained itself with the last sentence, but i'll talk about it anyway. 3.9 is by far probably the most interesting build of Stepmania in terms of history and usage; it's the build that was forked the most, it's the build that has the most themes ranging from super cool to incredibly well made to amateurish but charming thanks to it largely coming before Simply Love came in and rendered all other themes practically useless, and most importantly, it's the build that benefits the most from not having a 16:9 display thanks to it generally being built for 4:3 and similar aspect ratios. i'll probably never play this like i did then; a lot of the appeal out of obsessing over 3.9 back then came from being able to see so many different themes for the first time, but now that i've pretty much exhausted my available selection and now that this keyboard is infinitely worse for rhythm games thanks to being a sticky mess i don't really see a reason to go back, but it's still a nice game to have laying around in case of emergency boredom.

PS; rest in peace to my dreams of running Tetris The Grand Master 3 Terror-Instinct on here. if i just drag and drop my mangled fucked up install onto the computer it boots fine, but the graphics bug out after clearing a line and it becomes totally unplayable. also the GH2 Deluxe and Gran Turismo 3 .isos are just here because i had nowhere else to put them