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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – Not recommended (Day 5)

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Microsoft Messed up this game!

I honestly think Microsoft really did work hard at getting this Flight Simulator out before the end of the year and this is the results of their determination to release.   Some of the things people are having the problems with this game is suddenly returning to desktop and other issues with the game if you are using playing on the desktop.   I haven’t heard as much of problems on the XBOX gaming systems but I suspect that was how Microsoft wanted it.   However, I do think the Cloud idea was an idea and wasn’t the best idea.    I much preferred to download the game blob like I did with MSFS 2020 but they want to do it from cloud.   I have yet to get any good playable graphics like they show on the movies.

Career Mode

Great Idea and I love the idea of learning what it really takes to become a commercial pilot and to PPL(Private Pilots License).   I am glad to actually see how you would do it and the walking around the plane is good for the first few missions but is it required for the rest of the missions and flying?  I don’t know it is a necessary thing if you are truly flying the plane to check the plane before you fly it.   So I get the idea and how it is something a real pilot will do.  Doing all the things you learn from becoming a pilot may help you in actually becoming a pilot.  So I can’t say this isn’t a bad idea or part of the game.

World Photographer

Great way to explore the sites around the world and are a combinations of the MSFS 2020 and probably some new places in MSFS 2024.  So it is great resource for those who want to fly a plane and see these places.  You can probably walk around the explore them on foot in if you know how to do it.   However this isn’t anything new because it was somewhat available on the MSFS 2020 and was free for all to download.  I still don’t like the idea of using being maps to create the terrain on MSFS 2024 and I have yet to explore the idea of switching to something that has newer terrain images like Google or some other provider.

All in All

This isn’t really a better version such as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.   For the most part it can take anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes to load the game because it being used in the cloud.   Multiple people complaining about how bad it is or put up a negative review of it on steam.   If Microsoft and Asobo wants to make this game better they will need to put out some major updates to address all the crashing and have the game utilize peoples GPU to make the game work even better and make it look like the intro videos that they show while the game loads.   Don’t get me wrong they are doing it in a way to draw people into wanting to play the game but I have a pretty good system myself and I have a 30 series GPU so it should be able to do everything that video is looking like.   However that isn’t the case and it will probably never look that way since the game is being played from the cloud and we aren’t able to use the graphics that they want us to use for the game.    This will be like the Last of Us and the graphics will eventually get better or at least become more stable to not be a problem.  However Microsoft kind of ruined the game by releasing so soon when they should of worked harder at making it a better experience with their customers.  I’m going to sit back and take a waiting stance they fix all these problems that users are complaining about and then I will decide if this is better than MSFS 2020 but for right now it’s not even close.  MSFS is winning in my mind because I don’t have to worry about the game loading and crashing all the time.

The Surprising Advantage of Being Talkative in Job Interviews!

Paul

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Be Yourself in an Interview!

Understanding is the best solution to being good talker in the interview.   There are many who are saying you shouldn’t talk that much in an interview.  I tend to think this isn’t really a good approach unless you want to come off as one who doesn’t want to be engage with the interviewer(s).   Some would say, that you should just be yourself and I think that is good because if you are comfortable with the interviewers than it comes off as good fit for the job.   If you come off as nervous or uncomfortable then you may come off as not the right fit.   You might not know it or not but having the secret to keep quite maybe is the one thing that didn’t get you that one job.   You should be actively listening but you should also be engaging and be ready to show them that you are the right fit for the job.

Showcase your Knowledge, Passion and Expertise

One of the biggest advantages of being talkative is that you show your passion and experience in during the interview.   Some manager’s will like it and others will not, It just varies from one person to another.   Some managers will want you to be concise and to the point because they are way busier and maybe don’t have the time to do the interviews.  Read the room and understand when they are ready to go.  Showing you have a passion will in one way or another provide them the assurance that are the right fit for the job because they don’t want to hire someone who will hate their job and just do the bare minium.   Building Rapport is also good because they will want to know that you can do the job and put the customer first.   Also let’s not forget that if you have the ability to build a connection with the interviewers because they will get to know you even more and They may see that you have a lot to bring to the company, which could lead you to having a job offer come your way.

Authenticity and Positivity

Both words are nouns but they have some great advantages as you are interviewing.   You being authentic can help them see your personality and even see your values while at the same time measuring if you will be someone that people will come to acknowledge and being personable with.   It’s only human nature to want to create connections and be social, so there isn’t anything wrong with being authentic and personable towards the interviewer(s).    The real aim is that you shouldn’t talk way to long and you should keep your answers short as possible but you should also actively listen and respond to questions or show them you are the right candidate in one way or another.  Just remember to address the potential concerns that the interviewers might have and by doing that you are also showing that you are concerned with their feelings.

Stories help make it memorable

Remember to be authentic but also come up with stories that will showcase why you are a good fit for the job.   Understanding the job description and knowing what they are looking for can go a long way into being memorable.  They created the job description for a reason and we should be mindful of that while interviewing with them.  It’s definitely a two way street when it comes to job interviews, You get to know the people and make a connection with them and also learn more about them and see if the boss is someone you would like to work with in projects and other ways.  Ultimately you will be working with this manager and you’d have to decide if they will be a good influence on you and vice versa.   No manager is the same and as such you can tell from the interview if the manager does a lot of micromanagement or if they are more free spirited which can be a great plus in any work environment.

Have you had experiences where being talkative helped you in an interview? Share your stories in the comments below! And don’t forget to subscribe to my blog for more career tips and advice.

 

Say Goodbye to Sluggish Browsing: A Quick and Easy Cache Clearing Tutorial

Paul
Edge Browser

Why should I clear my cache?

The simple answer is the most important. You have a limited amount of space on any given space. Most of the time it might not be a problem but if you like to visit sites constantly then you may get unwanted files stored on your system that could slow your system down and even slow down your browser experience. It depends on how fast your system will react to your browsing and what happens when you get some bad cache files from websites.   This can help clear those up and stop all those popups that maybe becoming annoying to you.  You might get advertisements and other pop ups that will cause problems while you are trying to use your computer.

How Do I clear my cache in Google Chrome and Edge?

The real questions is how you would do this quickly and easily to help you get where you can have your browser speed up and non intrusive as it should be.   If you are getting popups or something that looks like a browser page then this is where you should start.   Clear your cache and get rid of the potenital cache causing problems.   Here’s how to do it easily and quickly:

On Google Chrome Press CTL-SHIFT-DEL, while you have Google Chrome up and running this is the quickest way to clear your cache in Chrome.

Google Chrome – Make sure you clear all the cache and click on Clear Data at the bottom to make sure you clear everything out of Chrome.

If you want to make sure you get all the data, you should select ‘All time” in Time Range and check all boxes to make sure you remove all necessary files off of Google Chrome.  Once done close out Google Chrome and restart and you should have a cleaner experience with Google Chrome.

Windows Edge Browser

On Windows Edge Browser copy and past this into your address bar.

edge://settings/privacy

Once there you should see something like this:

Select “Choose what to Clear”
Clear Cache in Edge

This will be the same thing as you did with Google Chome select Time range “All Time” and make sure to check the first 4 options available and hit Clear Now as edge removes all the cache that was collected over time.  Once done exit out of edge and then start it up and you should have no more problems with popups as long as you don’t have a different browser.   If you have a different you should search for how to clear the cache in those types of browsers.

What if you can’t delete the cache?

In Google Chrome the best and easily way to fix this to load up chrome in incognito mode and then try to delete the cache that way.  However this may or may not work depending on what might be causing this.

One Edge the easily pres Windows Key + R and type “start msedge -inprivate“.  Once you do that then try to clear the browser cache and see if that allows you to clear the cache.  The last part of this is that you might need to reboot your system to allow the system to complete some update or problems that might not allow you to clear cache for some reason or other.

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The Best 3 Free Tools for Desktop Support Professionals

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Display Driver Uninstaller

Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) is something that every desktop professionals should have mainly on computers that may have Graphics cards that are required for the job such as Nvidia or even AMD cards.   You will find that every so often some driver updates causes a problem and this is a very good tool to uninstall the driver completely.     I will say this is open sourced and is very good for every day support when you might need to use this little utility for just those occasions.   You will find this free tool will be used more and more and you can even keep it on a USB drive as a way to use it offline when you need to do use it.   It’s very small and won’t need a big USB drive but this is only one of the few that you might have available to use on your USB drive.

Portable Apps

Portable Apps has so many portable applications that it would be hard to talk about all them.   However there are several that I will talk about that you can install on the USB drive.  Depending on the size of your USB portable drive you have will depend on what you might want to install on the drive.   However if you have a big enough USB drive, you could in theory install all available applications from Portable Apps and then you would be set.

  • Revo Uninstaller Portable — Great for those pesky programs that might not uninstall all the way or when something goes wrong with uninstalling programs.
  • HackthisPortable — Good for looking for viruses, and Trojans that might be on the system and gives you a run down on what might be running on any given system.
  • McAffeeStingerPortable and Kaserpky Task killer —  These are great apps for programs that you have issues with when they want to keep running even when you need them to not be loaded or running on a system.
  • CPUZPortable and GPUZPortable — great ways to find out even more about finding out what drivers you might need for GPU and looking at what type of CPU might be on any given system.  In case you needed to know.
  • Microsoft Safty Scanner — Great portable app that you can use on any Windows system in case you might have a Virus infection and is being blocked from being download or run locally.
  • CCleanderPortable —  Another great applications to use to clean the registry and other places in Windows that might be causing problems and helps fix some of the registry problems you might have.

As you can see there are several portable apps you can install on any given USB drive and have ready at moments notice if you ever need it.  So this is great tool that you can use for what ever you might come your way.

WinDirStat

WinDirStat is something that helps me find what might be hogging a system drive.  It is great and showing graphically what could be taking up the space of a hard drive.  It is portable and can be put on USB also but can also be download and used for many different reason but mostly when you need to find out why the hard drive is so full and how what you can delete to create space.  So this is something most Desktop Support people will use at one time or another.   I have used this several times in the past to find files that can be deleted, you just have to be careful what you delete and never touch anything in the Windows Directory or Program Files directory unless you want the system no run properly when you reboot.

These are what I have on my USB just in case I need them but these are only a few of them because there are even more tools that I use when I need them however this would start you on the right to having a powerful USB drive when you might need it.   Do you have a favorite tool that you want to let everyone else know about?  Why not leave a comment and tell people about it.

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Windows Batch Scripting for Beginners and how to use it.

Paul

What is a Batch file?

Most people will never really understanding what the extension .bat is in Windows or even DOS.  However it is something that is native to programmers around the world because it is the first thing most people who make programs or works with scripting start to use way before they do anything else.  It should be considered the first linguistic languages that is very powerful.  It is designed to be used in DOS but can also be used in Windows as a DOS command easily and effectively through Windows OS.   Some of these are what you should explore even more to learn how to program and create scripts even more.  However this blog post is just a introduction into doing it and how you can use this in your everyday IT Job.

According to Wikipedia:

A batch file is a script file in DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows. It consists of a series of commands to be executed by the command-line interpreter, stored in a plain text file. A batch file may contain any command the interpreter accepts interactively and use constructs that enable conditional branching.

Understanding scripting is the first part in creating powerful scripts for everyday use.  However, I am one of the few to use the help command in DOS:

HELP [command]

This is a good tool for those who might want to explore the power of using a Batch to get your job done or to creating a batch file because you will need to know what you can use in the batch file.

Here are a few commands you might want to use in a batch file:

  • SET /P variable=[promptString]
  • Start of the batch file ECHO OFF and ECHO ON after the batch file is complete.
  • If and THEN (Wikipedia)
  • CALL filename.bat

Creating Batch files

I’m not going to go into much details about creating the batch in the way you might need but I will be talking about this in general about ways you can create a batch and which programs are good at helping you create a batch file.

First you need a program to create it.  You can always use Wordpad or Notepad but you could find it isnt’ a good as Notepad ++.   I have used it in the past for programming in many different programming languages such as Pascal, C++, COBOL, and SHELL Scripting.  I’ve talked about SHELL scripting in past for LINUX which you can use Notepad++ for it also to create Linux shell scripting.  I will say you can do a lot with the open-sourced program that is free to use.  So I always want to use this with anything I am doing because it shows you where you might have a problem in your scripting language and helps you identify how to fix it.  You’re best advice is to just try to think about what you want to accomplish with a batch file and start thinking logically about how you would do that.

You will need to make sure the .batextension is on the file name.  Make the filename something that you can easily run in DOS because you don’t want to make the batch file anything complicated because that might not work properly if you use a call command in another batch file.  So consider the naming convention of your batch file(s).

Trial and Error

After creating the batch file you will need to do some trial and error test to make sure it will work with what you need to use it for and also make sure there isn’t something unexpected.   This is what programmers do all the time by compiling  the program and running it on different systems to see what it will do in different Windows environments.

Finally, You will see that you can do so much more with a batch that you previously did and it can be a great asset in doing repetitive stuff at work or at home.   If you do this right it can even help speed up your life.   Here are a few Blog posts that I have talked about previous:

As you can see these will help you understanding scripting but also help you to figure out what you might want to do with a Batch and why you might need to create a batch file.  Even I know this is only a few blog post that will at least hopefully give you even more ideas on what will help you to create batch files.

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