I start working as an Help Desk Technician on August 20th for the Surrey School District. That would make it 14 Months and 5 Days after getting out of BCIT.

Ryan Orser.

I have heard a rumour that you cannot install legacy applications without going through the app store in Windows 8. So I decided to try and install Microsoft Office 2007 on my test machine. I knew that I would have to install .NET Framework 3.5 as it is a prerequisite. I decided to see if I would have any problems if I just chose to install it without installing .NET Framework 3.5. I was surprised when Windows 8 asked me if I wanted to have the Windows Installer download and install the prerequisites (that were from Microsoft) from their website. I chose yes and I got .NET Framework 3.0 along with 3.5.

The installation completed with no problems and everything works just fine. The rumor that you cannot install legacy applications is false.

Ryan Orser.

I have been looking through the Xbox Live Games App that comes with Windows 8 for a few days to see what I thought about it. The layout looks nice. The option to look through games that you can buy on the xbox is an okay feature. I clicked on a game in Game Activity that I bought (Halo Reach) and a box popped up giving a brief description, beacon status, and 4 things I could do: First off is buy the game (Funny I thought I bought it from Xbox Live already),  Second see game details, third Play on Xbox, and Fourth play a trailer. While all of those things are nice to see, I find the first thing on the list is buy it when Xbox should know I have already bought it from them since I was signed in to my account is a little alarming.

I found the app to be a little slow as well. It shows your last 3 friends that are online which for me is 2 people who were online less than 12 hours ago and one who hasn’t been online for a very long time as it says offline. What really slows it down is when you go to look at the achievements. I guess it takes a long time to download them all since I have over 500, (first being from Halo ODST and 500th being from Halo 3.)

The Windows game market place in the app is coming soon so I really cannot comment on that piece of the app.

Over all I really do like this app. Since this is only the App Preview I expect it to get better. I believe that the Xbox team and the Windows Team are doing a really good job of integration between them as from rumours I hear is that the Xbox may become an entertainment device that can play games along with the usual movies and music.

I will continue to use this and see if the updates make it more useful.

I am continuing to get the Xbox Companion app to work. Until I do get it to work I will probably be trying to find something else to post about.

Ryan Orser.

I have played around with Windows 8 Release Preview for a few days now. I thought I would share some thoughts on how it works plus some pros and cons.

Pros:

• Runs smoothly on vmware workstation with 1GB of ram.
• Installation was easy to use. Easier to install than Windows 7.
• Hasn’t crashed on me once! (Should tell you the reason of no “First Impressions of Windows 8 Consumer Preview” or “First Impressions of Windows 8 Developer Preview.)
• Desktop has a smoother feel.
• Most of the installed apps do not crash even though they are preview apps.
• Location is pretty good.

In september I wrote my A+ exams and am now A+ certified. Yesterday I wrote my MCITP: Windows 7, Enterprise Administrator and am now an MCITP.

I am trying to figure out which certification to write next: Network + or 70-640 MCTS: active directory for windows server 2008.

I have been playing Forza Motorsports 3 since I bought it last August.  It is a great game and well worth the $44 I bought it used. The cars are really nice … mostly. The cars I drive in most are the Ferrari. I have the highest level which is level 50. I have 45 out of 50 achievements. The achievements I have left are: Year 5, Year 6, Own at least 1+ cars from every manufacturer,  have a lap with 100,000+ drift points, and achieve gold in every race in event list in Seasons Play. All those 5 achievements are worth 235 Gamerscore. The other 45 achievements are worth in total: 765 Gamerscore.

There are some great tracks. Racing in the city streets, rural areas and race tracks. There is a lot of advertisements in the game. a little to much for my liking but I guess that is how Turn10 makes more money.

The different views you can have of the track include: inside the car, behind the car with mirror, behind the car without mirror, and there is one more but I cannot think of the last one.

I really like the game and I hope to beat it soon.

Ryan Orser.

I have been playing Harry Potter and the deathly hallows Part 1. I have been playing the single player mode. I have been stuck at a part of the game but I think I have figured it out. I have started to start playing multiplayer with the kinect.

The game with Kinect is quite different than I thought. I thought you could play the game that is in single player but no. You cannot play the game but you can play missions. When I had my friend over we played the missions in Kinect and we came 11th overall in the leader board in one of the missions.

In the missions you play against time to complete. The faster you win the higher in the standings you get.

It is quite fun. Problem is that the type of clothing that people in my family wear are baggy so it is difficult to play. When you try to swing your arm the sleeve would go over your hand making the kinect lose sight of your hand.

Overall it is a fun game. Well worth playing.

Ryan Orser.

Just for the fun of it I decided to get the Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade for my sister who likes windows 7. I then decided to create a video of the unboxing.

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I have found the pre-beta of Windows 7 on the net. So I downloaded it and installed it in a virtual machine. I have had a few problems:

1. Internet drivers do not work!
2. The new theme they showed off at PDC is not on the build as now you need a hack to get it working.
3. When I installed the internet drivers I get “Code 10 could not start.”

That is what has happened so far and yes I know it is pre-beta and that it will not always work but for it to find the drivers, and not install them properly is a big big problem and is a big big bug. So I hope that in their beta that they will fix this problem as I have no way to upgrade to the next bug fixes.

If you have any ideas on how to get this working leave a comment and I will happily try it out.

Ryan Orser.

I have had this one trouble with the new IE8 beta with the Google Toolbar. The Google toolbar would crash IE8 which would restart the browser and then would happen again in a continuous loop. The only way to fix this problem is to turn off the Google Toolbar via Tools>Toolbars>Google Toolbar. This gets rather annoying after a while so I decided it would be better to turn it off.

If you have any problems with the IE8 Beta you can leave a comment here about it. (Comments are on moderation so do not post them twice.)