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

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2011/03/4

<strong>Day(s) worked or described:</strong> T F, T F, T (Sick on Friday)

<strong>Total hours for week: </strong>8.5 (x2.5)

<strong>The School: </strong>Reavis

<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Tech general, Helping Teacher, Lab supervision

<strong>Main Report or Narrative: </strong>So the past few weeks were a little more uneventful than earlier, mostly because there really aren't any big projects happening at Reavis anymore. In any case, a lot happened in terms of just small things. I mostly ended up helping teachers out, as well as trying to further square away the computers that are sitting in rooms 202 and 112 waiting to be delivered out into the world. For the most part, those computers are ready to go, but I'm still working on figuring out which rooms would be best for them. I talked with several teachers, and by far the biggest problem in distributing these computers is just free space in the rooms. I mean apparently no teacher has enough room for a full desktop + monitor set up. I ran into this problem consistently in most rooms, as the placements of the electrical sockets in the rooms just ruin a lot of plans for setting computers up, unless extension cords are snaked throughout the room, which is problematic in its own right. In the end, I managed to get 3 computers out to classrooms, but there's still a fair number of them still sitting there with little to do. I'm unsure what to do with the remaining 4 or so, but they might end up getting used as replacements for the burned out ones in the computer lab or something.

I was working to try to get several additional computers working that failed the initial screening. One had a busted power supply, but for some reason I couldn't remove the power supply, and neither could Terry, so we just kind of shrugged and moved on. There was also a computer with a mysterious beep code that turned out to just mean that the RAM was bad. Unfortunately it was the rare kind that didn't appear anywhere in the school (DDR 184-pin), so Terry brought over this pretty big box of RAM that I grabbed some from for some computer upgrades.

In other news, I'm finding that more and more computers in the computer lab have low motherboard batteries. I put in an order for more of them, but they haven't come in yet, so there might be some problems with Deep Freeze until those can get in. Also I've noticed that the heater isn't being turned on in the computer lab any more, which is obviously a good thing for those computers. There's also been some problems of hardware getting taken and moved around in the computer lab lately, but I don't think there's a practical way to stamp that out aside from just telling teachers to keep a tighter leash on their students (unlikely but...).

As for a summary of the tech problems that occurred at Reavis over the past few weeks, for the most part they were complaints about the speed of computers. I'm not sure what the source of the problem is, as I've observed several identical Optiplex 260s and 280s in configuration performing at very different speeds. I'm guessing that there's a relationship between the speed of the computer and the number of programs installed, though that's completely unconfirmed. In any case, I got calls in rooms 204, 205, 107, 207, and 216 about slow computers over the course of the past few weeks. I've been trying to round up spare RAM and distribute them out to slow computers that have 256 MB, but the performance improvement varies depending on the machine. Sometimes uninstalling some programs and defragmentation helps, but not significantly. I'm guessing that the Windows install might be the source of the problems then, but repairing Windows might be a bit problematic. In the end, I just settled for some modest increases in the speed of the computers. Hopefully I won't get too many more complaints for the same rooms...

As for specific tech issues, there was one case of malware popping up on a computer in room 102. I'm not exactly sure how it happened,  seeing as how McAfee was running, but it was some malware posing as an anti-virus program and reporting 50000 errors that must be repaired. I'm not sure exactly what kind of malware it was, but it wasn't a very problematic one. It disabled most .exes and the task manager, but I grabbed process explorer and got it running by just changing the name to "explorer.exe" (like I said, not a very good piece of malware). Shut down the process tree of the malware program, and it didn't start up again, which thankfully meant that it didn't infest any deeper into the computer. Then I just installed and ran malwarebytes to get rid of it. Not sure why McAfee didn't catch that in the first place though.

There were also some more problems with printers. In particular, the one in room 204 kept on reporting some issues, but they seemed to resolve themselves after a while. One time a teacher had a problem with the printer constantly reporting being "busy", but that problem just seemed to clear itself up. Not sure what's up with that.

I also got some requests to install some software on some computers, including phonics software and a reader program. I was amazed at just how slowly some of these things installed. Pretty incredible.

I think that that's more or less everything that happened at Reavis for the past few weeks, or at least everything important.