(posting and email)                                                                                   
                                                                                                      
Hi, Ben,                                                                                              
                                                                                                      
I'll spare you the details of my DSL tale of woe, but the short version is                            
I was offline from Friday afternoon and all weekend, so yesterday and                                 
today I've been playing catch-up on email and school reporting etc.                                   
                                                                                                      
Thanks for your Week 2 report from Canter.  I'm still amused at the idea                              
of the bathroom computers.  Here are some scattershot responses to                                    
particular points you raise.  


   Unless there is some "precious" irreplaceable program on a 98, we                                
hardly ever use the "upgrade" option but instead install W2K from the CPS                             
CD as a clean install, including formatting the destination partition as                              
an NTFS partition and losing all the content that was on there.  (We may                              
speak of this casually as an upgrade, of course, since what was once 98                               
has been upped to 2000, but it's a replacement, not an upgrade-in-place.)                             
  The reason is just that a clean install is more likely to work smoothly.                            
And for that matter, doing a strict upgrade is generally not worth the                                
trouble since the programs you are trying to preserve often don't run well                            
under W2K after all.    

  As a related matter, the approach to existing documents depends                                  
completely on where the computer was, and who was using it for what.  The                             
machines in the restroom were in effect abandoned, and I wouldn't hesitate                            
one minute to format the disk and do a totally fresh install.  A computer                             
on a teacher's desk is at the opposite end of the spectrum ... you would                              
always have a discussion with the user.  In the middle are shared machines                            
as in the teacher resource room, and student classroom or lab computers.                              
Russ, can you add some guidance for the particular cases at Canter?               

  When backup is needed, and the network interface is working, consider                             
uploading to Canter-srv02; either a teacher's private folder for the                                  
teacher desktop computers, or the semi-public shares for a semi-public                                
computer.  

  Recombining RAM remains a good strategy!

 Where you want to backup off a drive that is no longer bootable, as an                            
alternative to opening up another computer and attaching the drive onto                               
the ribbon cable, we have a couple enclosure devices that then hook to a                              
host computer via USB. 

  <i>When using the remediation utilities from the canter-adm01 server, I                              
would suggest avoiding the one big program from the top section of the                                
Windows Maintenance Utilities page, and instead selectively use the                                   
individual-task numbered wizards from the bottom section.</i>

