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

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2011/10/11

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

<strong>Total hours for week:</strong> 6.5

<strong>The School:</strong> Reavis

<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Tech general

<strong>Main Report or Narrative: </strong>Monday was a holiday for the school (we should get that day off too :( ), so I didn't work that day. On Tuesday, I arrived to a host of issues. As I went in, I caught Mrs. Tutson, the teacher in room 203, walking out, and she mentioned that she couldn't get on Impact at home for some reason. I don't know anything about that, so I assumed that it was a CPS issue, but I'll double check that later when I see her in school. She also mentioned that her monitor was having some issues, but when I went to go check it, it was just that the power cord was a little bit loose. I pushed the cord in fairly tight, so hopefully that will last a while.

The new art teacher in room 2 apparently had a computer that didn't work, but there was an after school activity going on in there, so I elected to hopefully let them finish before going in. Turns out that I didn't go back at all, so I'll have to fix that tomorrow. I had another crack at the 207 printer/laptop issue, with no success. I'm not sure what's going on there. The same teacher then mentioned that the computer that was linked up to the smartboard wasn't starting up. It was giving out some beep codes, which when I looked online pointed to some hardware issue. I checked the inside and saw nothing wrong, so I just pushed the cords into the slots to make sure that they were secure. Apparently the power cord to the hard drive wasn't fully pushed in, which was an easy fix. I'm not sure how that cord got knocked loose, but whatever.

On Wednesday, Mitch came over to check up on me, so we first went to room 207 where we worked on the computer-printer issue again. It turns out that Windows 7 is a little bit pickier than Windows XP about finding network printers, as we weren't able to access it from the "add printer" wizard. Instead, Mitch had the idea to connect directly to the computer over the network and connect to it that way. That ended up working beautifully, and Windows 7 was even kind enough to auto download the drivers for the printer, which was strange because normally it just uses the drivers on the computer it's connected to to print things. Regardless, we got it working so I'm fine with that. Mitch also showed me around the computer lab, which I realize that I hadn't checked since returning. It turns out that over the summer, we had 3-5 more "yellow blinking light of death" problems, which we think is related to the motherboard, but we're not 100% sure. In any case, I think we'll have to get completely new machines for each one that burns out, as it looks like everything that isn't attached to the motherboard works just fine. We can salvage the HDD and RAM of the broken ones, and keep them for backup. There's also one computer whose heatsink actually detached from the motherboard somehow, so uhh... I'm not sure what to do with that one. We could solder it back on, but it might be easier to just trash it. I also got approached by the after school teachers from last week. It turns out that they wanted me to install a comic book program on some of the lab computers, but they hadn't bought the licenses yet, so I'll get to that later.

On Thursday and Friday I examined the new X120e laptops that came in. They were working just fine, though there were a few problems with them. First, they give an error that the version of Windows they're running isn't genuine. I'm pretty sure that that's not what CPS intended, but I don't know if that's worth doing anything to fix that. They also apparently auto login to the administrator account, which is definitely troublesome. There's also no techco account on any of them, so I spent a lot of my time setting up the techco accounts and setting them to not auto login. The other thing I noticed is that they don't have Deep Freeze installed on them. I don't know if we should, and if we do, we should probably install Deep Freeze on the Dell laptops as well, to keep things consistent. I also took a look at Mrs. Casaday's computer, which needed to be connected to a printer in the counselor's office. That printer was set up for IP printing, so that was pretty easy on my end.