TheChrisD - Rant Central

Live stuff - does it really work?

Most of you know about the fact that there have been a lot of Xbox Live issues recently. At first, it didn’t look too bad, since I was able to get into Halo 3 matchmaking quite easily. However, there still seem to be a lot of underlying issues with the dashboard, Xbox.com and general connection issues. This is what brings me to my question: Do Live services really work?

Now I’m not just talking about Xbox Live, I’m also talking about Windows Live. I’ve just been watching the Microsoft CES keynote (after being led to it by Adam, who stayed up to watch it), I decided to have another look at the "other" Windows Live services that I don’t use.

• Windows Live Writer

  Before, I used to think: "Surely I don’t need it, I can write blog stuff from my blog’s admin panel". However, it seems to be quite a handy little program, especially as it has all the features that I can get from the WP panel. So I can set the comments status, the excerpt, slug and others from Writer. From the looks of things, it’s going be used it future, but only after I make sure it works.

  Firstly, I’m not sure if it will actually post, and if it will post the way I told it to. Secondly, I may have to manually edit the connection settings, as I move from college to home and vice versa. And finally, it could completely break the blog. But we’ll see how things go.

• Windows Live Mail

  This was another case of "I don’t need it", mainly since I was using Thunderbird for my e-mail and feeds and stuff. But, once again, after trying it out, it seems that I will be using it in future. And that is actually scary, since I always went by Firefox and Thunderbird for the fact that they are open-source and community-driven (in a way). Although Thunderbird wasn’t really as important, since it’s main reason for use isn’t the fact it displays websites properly…

It shouldn’t be long before I make the decision about whether to stick with the Windows Live stuff, or stay back with the old methods. Even though I’m not particularly a big fan of most M$ stuff, there are some things which aren’t all that bad!

Hopefully Xbox Live will be working fully again soon. There are still a load of dashboard issues that need to be resolved. Sometimes it can take half a minute to fully load a player’s Gamercard, or to send a message, or to change settings! Which isn’t helpful, when I am a bit of a Gamerscore whore, and I like to compare games with others a lot

Which brings me to a little recap of the recent gaming: another 530GS in Halo 3 completing campaign (Heroic - I’m not that suicidal to do Legendary first time!), and doing a bit of Lone Wolves; 370GS in Call of Duty 4 (Veteran - it’s not worth going through the game twice, and then again through some missions for some of the achievements), and a measly 10GS in NASCAR 08, although that can be blamed on the fact the disc is screwed. Also, Xbox.com doesn’t seem to report that I scored an achievement in it, although my Games Library, and achievement lists show me as gaining the achievement, but the game as a whole has 0. I might try to boot up the game again, but odds are it won’t boot. Only twice has it booted, and then it’s complained about an "unreadable disc" after about 5 minutes. Other than that is misinterprets it as a DVD or a "Mixed Media Disc". I’ll be going back to GAME within a few days to try and see if they will replace the disc for me. If they do, woo! If they don’t, they’re fucking asses!

UPDATE: It appears that this posted properly, without the need to edit any custom proxy settings - the only thing I have to say against it, is that it does produce messy code, making it very difficult to edit manually (can’t seem to figure out how to edit using Writer), and that it doesn’t seem to have native tag support…