Xbox Live Labs on Hughesnet

If you have logged into XBL in the past week, you might have noticed a Labs program. It looks enticing, download the program, let it gather information on your internet connection and send it to Microsoft. (It is located in the community window on your dashboard.) Neat thing is, you don't have to do anything to it. Just let the darn thing run. Always on the lookout for way to let Microsoft know that there are those of us out here that don't have blazingly-fast interwebs, I went to download Labs.

Well, there is a huge problem here for those of us on Hughesnet. We all have the FAP to deal with, and there is a disclaimer that pops up saying that running labs is going to run through a lot of data. Well thanks for being vague, but really, we need a more concrete number than that.

Don't you just love me? We are talking about 1 GB per HOUR that this program runs. There are rewards for doing this:

30 minutes of continuous usage gets your avatar a lab coat.

1 hour is a brain helmet.

6 hours is crazy scientist hair.

The FAP is 2 AM Eastern Time until 7 AM Eastern time.

5 hours.

Now in the interest of  this blog, I am going to run it for 6 hours and bust my FAP, and report on what happens in the morning. Turns out only the first 30 minutes needs to run in one shot, the rest can be resumed whenever!

I did get my lab coat!

I better see some crazy scientist hair.

**Update. I may have to do this another night. After 45 minutes, my xbox live disconnected and I keep getting an error message. I can see my friends online and "can play online" but other services will reappear when available.  I think that XBL just had a hiccup, and I am resuming Labs, but an hour later than I originally started.