Well, I was sititng down to talk some more about the u software that is proving interesting yet unstable as it keeps crashing every few minutes….but when I tried to log onto the laptop today I found I may have succeeded in the challenge of the techie boys and finally broken it without even trying to !!

I have discovered a couple of annoying little problems:

1) Windows 7 does not come with Windows Movie Maker as part of the operating system — ironic considering it gives us Windows DVD Maker, and no disk drives, but extremely disappointing as WMM is a really handy free piece of software. Apparently you can edit with Windows Live but this doesn’t appear to be on it either. Really disappointing especially if like me you do lots of Video Production, stop motion, digital poetry etc….. We do however have Adobe Premier Elements — the dumbed down version of Premier.  I meet alot of teachers who claim to use Premier with Yr 7 and above but doubt they would use the to its full capabilities as the full version is a high end professional use software that teachers have no real need for. It will be nice to have software I don’t have to beg for and and works well  (I hope). If this is on the kids laptops it will be fantastic (see my other posts about the frustrations of digital video editing at school. (You can download the movie maker for Windows Live here: http://download.live.com/moviemaker

2) After successfully using the wireless connection at home for several days the wireless finder seems to have given up the ghost and no  amount of trouble shooting will repair the problem  – it appears to be  a Windows 7 problem and we get the message below:

 

As I type this at the dining room table watching Meerkat Manor we have bypassed the wireless by plugging in the ethernet cable – disappointing as it takes the portability out of a wireless laptop !

I have tried updating through the windows website but get this error message: