<strong>Your Name:</strong> Ben Hyman
<strong>Today’s Date</strong>: 2008/1/25
Reporting on most recent week
<strong>Day(s) worked or described</strong>: T, F
<strong>Total hours for week</strong>: 5
<strong>The School</strong>: Canter Middle
<strong>Kind of Work</strong>: Tech General
<strong>Main Report or Narrative</strong>:

Okay, I don't know if you can own ("pwn") an operating system, but that's what I did Tuesday. If you'll forgive the unprofessionalism, I pretty much spanked Windows 98. After trying futilely to recover the documents on one of the '98 systems last week (I'd also removed the memory last week), I opened up the case again and removed the hard drive. Since we didn't have a spare IDE cable handy, I simply replaced the hard drive on another CPU with this one. After some time to let Windows 98 pick up the new hardware, I was able to download a set of generic USB drivers from the Internet (which I hadn't been able to do earlier, but the different network card in the new CPU was working), and finally get my flash drive to work. I backed up all the files (a pathetic number of MB for all that trouble), switched back the hard drives, and gave the worthless Windows 98 CPU a metaphorical kick in the pants (remember, there's no memory in it now, and now I have all of the hard drive data backed up). Of course, this was before I got Mitch's email about USB hard drive enclosures ... still, it was a fun challenge. Right before I left, I discovered that the other computer in the lounge wasn't sending anything to the monitor, but I had to leave.

Friday I took a look at the computer in the lounge where the monitor wasn't working. I finally got the case open (I'd attempted to on Friday and encountered much difficulty!), but nothing looked horribly wrong inside. I knew it wasn't a monitor issue because I hooked the computer up to another monitor and saw the same problem. The graphics card was fairly difficult to reseat because of some poor engineering, but I was able to do so successfully anyway. After I completely reseated it, I was finally able to see the BIOS starting up (and presumably would have seen Windows start up as well, but I didn't bother to wait since it wasn't a software thing). However, after I sealed up the case and everything, the problem appeared again, and this time reseating did nothing! A spare graphics card I took out of another non-functional computer wouldn't fit in the PCI slot. I'll see if I can find any more, but I don't know. Something that's quite interesting is that I removed the graphics card entirely but the computer still started up without any POST complaints. Any ideas?

I moved the non-functional-graphics-card computer upstairs and finally got around to placing two functional computers in the teacher's lounge. However, I'm not satisfied with either of them -- for some reason, the Internet connection on one of them is pretty slow (however, I finally joined it to the INSTR domain today!), and the other one only has 128 MB of memory and is complaining about it. I'll see what I can do about those problems, but I'm not holding out much hope for memory.

Ah, memory. I can't believe my MacBook has 16 times as much memory as a fair number of these computers. I'm running out of memory to switch around. Mr. Fishbein (from last week) informed me that his computer was still running slow; since he felt it was a big enough of an issue, I took 128 MB out of a lab computer with 256 MB (I'd redistributed this as well last week) and put it in his. So now his student computer has 256 MB, and the lab computer is back to 128 MB. He shouldn't have any more problems, but I'm concerned about other computers, like the ones in the teacher's lounge I mentioned above; I also need to check on Tuesday whether the computer that has 128 MB will complain about it, since that's what it was doing before that necessitated the RAM redistribution last week.

Apparently there's a new teacher at the school who needs a computer. The teacher who informed me of this also told me that she had an extra computer in her room which I could give to the new teacher. I'll have to do this on Tuesday because the room where the computer I was to move turned out to be locked. It should be a spare computer in room 202 going to room 105.

I'm also seeing a hard drive error on E1, the same computer I'd seen it on before. This was not a random error: I had to open up the casing to check on the RAM (to see if there was any I could redistribute, as per two paragraphs above), and I may have jostled something. I'll take care of it on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, today seemed pretty futile with all the memory problems that popped up, and the graphics card issue I wasn't able to solve :-(. Still, I appreciate the chance to improve my skills working with hardware, since it's something I'd had little past experience with.

As for Tuesday, I'll fix E1, take care of the computer for the new teacher, and see if I have time for memory issues and graphics card issues.

<strong>Remaining Issues, see <a href="http://reporting.cuip.net/2008/01/18/week-2-canter/">previous post</a>. Also, this website in Internet Explorer 6.</strong>

Quote of the Week: "I hadn't smoked in ten or twelve years, but I wished then I'd had a cigarette that I could have taken a final drag on and flipped still burning into the river as I turned and walked away. Not smoking gains in the area of lung cancer, but it loses badly in the realm of dramatic gestures." (Robert Parker, <em>The Judas Goat</em>)

-Ben Hyman