<strong>Your Name: </strong>Allan Zhang<strong></strong>

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2010/11/05

<strong>Day(s) worked or described:</strong> T F

<strong>Total hours for week: 7</strong>

<strong>The School: </strong>Reavis<em>
</em>

<strong>Kind of Work: </strong>Orientation, Helping Teachers, Lab Work

<strong>Main Report or Narrative: </strong>For my first week at Reavis, it was mostly orientation to Reavis's tech situation. On Tuesday, Mitch showed me around Reavis, though the vast majority of that time was spent looking for Mr. Coleman, who, as we learned about 2 hours later, was actually out on a camping trip with Mr. Khalghatti and middle school (I'm sorry for probably butchering your name even though you can't read this!). So basically that meant that I didn't meet my future supervisors at all that day. Anyway, I got a run down on the basics of login information, passwords, Deep Freeze, and all that good stuff. Once we finished that, we headed out to, not only look for Mr. Coleman, but also to check on the computer situation in some classrooms.

The first classroom we came to was room 105, a Kindergarten class, where we learned that basically everything was hunky-dory there. Moving onto room 107, we examined the tech situation there, and discovered a rather slow Dell GX260 and a lifeless computer that didn't have power cables nor a mouse. We left that there for now, and moved on. At this point, Mitch left me for other things, so I continued my journey onward to fix the tech problems of the little people. School had let out at this point, so I was free to work with no little children around, so I checked up on the rest of the rooms on the first floor of the East (or is that North?) wing. Most other rooms were in working shape, although I could only really access 4 others. The only room that needed anything done was Room 114, where I connected the computer there to the printer. I then returned to try to see if I could speed up the computer in 107, and upon looking at the installed programs, I could tell that there was a lot of bloatware on the computer, but I didn't know which was the bad bloatware, so I left it all alone for now.

On Friday, I went with Mitch to go hunting Mr. K&amp;C again, but Mr. K was out sick. We did find Mr. C though. I worked primarily in the lab, though a vast majority of my time was spent troubleshooting the three computers in the lab that absolutely refused to work. They all had the same problem - a blinking orange light of DOOM on the power button that indicated that they had given up on life. Upon consultation with the interwebs, I learned that they all had, as Dell puts it, "some internal error" (thanks Dell. That's exactly what I needed!), so I borrowed some tools from the office and opened them up. I then proceeded to take it apart. I tried switching the power source, HDD, and RAM, to no effect. I then took everything out and examined the motherboards. The tops of a few capacitors had leaked, but it wasn't anything major enough to cause a computer-suicide. I also saw some other capacitors on other good Motherboards that were much worse off, but the computer was working fine, so it's probably not those. Unfortunately, Dell really gives me little to work on, but I assume that the motherboards are the problem, it's just that where exactly the problem lies is completely unknown to me. The processors + heat sink are completely soldered onto the board, so if it's a problem with that, then there's really nothing that can be done. The only thing that I think could be the problem upon reflection are faulty wires, but I doubt those are the problem. I'll have to check that the next time I go in.

After frustrating myself with those computers, I decided to do something more productive, and I went down and set up the computer in 107 with the supplies that Mitch brought. I got the computer working just fine, and apparently the GX260s all have internal wireless cards or something, because it had internet and was configured right off the bat. I just set up a connection between that computer and the central printer, and it was good to go.

So now I returned to the lab for round 2 with the computers, proceeded to chicken out, and decided to check out the inventory of computers laying around in the back. I only examined 3, but two of them had the same orange light problem that the other computers in the room did. At this point, I'm almost convinced that the problem lies with some terribad motherboard construction, because the problem appears to be rather widespread. The other computer I examined had a broken off heatsink that absolutely cannot be repaired, so we should just salvage the parts from that one and toss it. Then I left.