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

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2011/01/14

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

<strong>Total hours for week: </strong>8.5

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

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

<strong>Main Report or Narrative:</strong> Tuesday: I came in on Tuesday resolved to finish up fixing up the laptop fleet, though I totally underestimated the amount of work that needed to be done on those. A lot of them already had the OS installed, so it was just installing the drivers and doing the CPS remediation, which didn't take too long. The laptops are now good to go, though currently they're still stuck in storage since the laptop cart hasn't arrived yet. As for the rest of day, it was mostly spent checking up on some tech issues and getting some things squared away. Most of the time was spent going around on the 200-210 wing, which I had neglected for the most part. I began getting those computers up there connected to the printer in 103, and I spent a lot of time trying to get the old Lexmark printer in room 201 to work. It keeps on saying it's jammed, but I'm not sure what the problem with it is. If worst comes to worst, we can always haul the spare printer from room 218 over and hook it up, though I haven't done an complete examination of that printer yet. I also spent some time that day trying to fix up a laptop that was just plain slow. The teacher was using it for both personal use and class use, but it had gotten so bloated that it became ridiculously hard to use. I uninstalled and disabled a lot of programs. There weren't any serious errors on the computer, nor did the hard disk record any bad sectors, so it seemed to be fine for the most part. It sped up quite a bit after I did maintenance on it, though not as much as I thought it would. Oh well.

A teacher also requested some mice for three computers in her classroom that didn't have any, and I scrounged up some mice for her, though that didn't last long...

Friday: ... because the balls in the mice got stolen by Friday. Sigh. I couldn't find any spare optical mice, so we're going to need to either order them or obtain them. It shouldn't be a big deal, considering how cheap they are. Anyway, Mr. Khelghati was out, so I couldn't really figure out what other big project to work on, so I went around tying up some loose ends. First the computer in 114. I didn't have time to examine it on Tuesday, so I spent a lot of time trying to get it to work. After fiddling with it a bit, I went into the default Windows property and turned off the Linksys configuration program that I was using. Apparently Windows was trying to do things to the adapter that the Linksys program didn't like or something, so it kept on failing to properly connect with the wireless. Anyway, the problem got fixed, so I hooked the computer up. However, the teacher needed Word on the computer, which needed Service Pack 3. I don't know what happened, but somehow I accidentally ran the complete CPS XP remediation tool, and it kept on hanging on the "patching" step. In the end, I got distracted by other things, and I didn't resolve the issue by the end of the day. I did end up disabling the "infinite loop" that it kept on trying to do, where it would try to restart remediation from where it left off upon a reboot.

Anyway, I also got a wireless card for installation up in room 201, so I installed that and got it up and running. I didn't get a chance to investigate the printer in that room, so I'll have to check it out on Tuesday. Now by hooking up a computer in room 209 with the Smartboard, I deprived the teacher of a computer with a private computer to input grades. There were two other computers in the room that were unplugged for some reason, and thankfully one of them had wireless. It was rather slow, so I cleaned it up a bit.

In room 205, the teacher was complaining of a slow computer, so I went in and did some maintenance. In the end though, Internet Explorer was just plain slow and cumbersome, so I installed Chrome for her on the computer in an effort to speed things up (Why isn't at least Firefox the default browser on these computers? :/). From what I could see, it was much faster than trying to deal with Internet Explorer, but the interface was just so different, that I noticed that the teacher was initially having a bit of difficulty getting adjusted to it. After just a few minutes of helping her, she seemed to get it though. I just realized that I don't know if Impact and all that stuff is Chrome compatible... I probably should have confirmed that. Oops.

Terry also came today, but because Mr. Khelghati wasn't there, he couldn't really do too much. We headed up to the computer lab after Mr. Coleman told us there were some problem computers there, and discovered a few things. First of all, another computer succumbed to the BYLOD (Blinking Yellow Light Of Doom), so that's another computer permanently down. I'm starting to suspect that it might indeed be the heat in the room that's causing the problems, as the room was literally sweltering when we entered. Otherwise, it was just some cables that had gotten loose, and some inputs that had been changed. No other major problems.