Orcas

This is the first of a couple posts I'm hoping to get finished tonight, the other two are in progress but I don't want to post them until I finish some other bits and pieces. Back to this post though. Saturday I was finally able to get all the Visual Studio Orcas downloads, and I got myself Virtual PC 2007, uncompressed the base and orcas files to give it a whirl. Now i know its CTF so you have to be patient however what I experienced yesterday was far from good :( Upon creating my new virtual machine as per the site's instructions I was presented with an error. Instead of being able to update and choose the location of my base image for the orcas machine i get the browse file window, find my file, and then click open . . . . and that's it nothign happens, you can click open as much as you want but nothing happens :( Bit of a major error as Orcas won't work without it. I then tried to load the base image. This loads up fine but could I login with the login details provided by Microsoft, hell I couldn't :( After a few searches on le Google I found that the password is actuall P@ssw0rd, not P2ssw0rd. Error 2 for Microsoft. (Error 1 was my image not wanting to update) So of course I'm now confident I can load up my virtual image just to play with Windows Server 2003 at least. Well not quite, P@ssw0rd wouldn't work either. By this point I'm pondering if I continue this venture or just give up. However not being a quitter, well often, I decided to Google my new problem. Low and behold the answer came quite quickly. Basically the Base PC image its expecting by default a US keyboard, so to get an @ you do shift + 2, I had naturally assumed that Virtual PC made this conversion for you, as that's the logical thing to do. Keyboard Mappign can't be that hard, especially as it was a Microsoft OS I was virtualizing, now armed with the solution I tried logging in again P"ssw0rd. As you can imagine I was quite happy when it logged in, however I was surprised by the fact you have to activate your windows :( very odd in my books, especially as I had disabled the network card emulation as I didn't really want Server 2003 on my network. Any how after activating the network and rebooting Windows booted fine and activated. However I still can't run orcas as the stupid orcas image wouldn't update. When I find out why I will post my solution here so other people can not be bogged down by these issues. I'm hoping to see how good orcas is one day. Probably not today though :(