<strong>Your Name:</strong> Erwin Carl

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2011/10/17

<strong>Day(s) worked or described:</strong> T's Th's F's

<strong>Total hours for week: </strong>~7

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

<strong>Main Report or Narrative:</strong>

Tuesday 9/27:  Start of new year at Fiske. I checked to see if the the computers on the 2nd floor lab lab and up and running. We have 3 computers that have amber lights and 3 computers that just won't turn on. I checked in with Ms. Howell in Rm107 because she needed the student's computers plugged in. I also removed some startup programs to help the computer load faster. Mr. Miller talked about working with some students on a podcast where they read the books online and I put the audio online. This is for when I get back after the Track E intercession.

Thursday 9/29: First printer problem of the year. A printer won't work in 306 even though it is on and hooked up to the computer. Not a jam issue so I tried reinstalling drivers and changing ports to no avail. I replugged the USB and restarted the computer and success! It seemed like the USB connection between the computer and printer was faulty.

Friday 9/30: I added a shortcut to starfall.com on all the desktops on the 3rd floor lab. Manually thawing the DeepFreeze, restarting, adding the shortcut, and restarting again makes it a bit tedious. I went into Rm102 to try and fix a computer. The ethernet was hooked up to faulty lines so I had to use an ethernet switch. I could not log in as it did not have enough space on disk and insufficient security. I was not able to fix this so I need to do this ASAP when I get back to Fiske.

Tuesday 10/4:  Since Fiske is on the Track E intercession, I went to Fermi temporarily. Mitch took me on a brief tour of the school so I knew where the computer labs where and who the staff were. Fermi got some new computers with Windows 7. First problem we worked on as a printer problem. There was an issue with the LPT? connection between the computer and the printer. Switching to a USB cable fixed the problem. Mitch also showed me how to connect/share a printer over a network .  Before we left we also worked on another printer, this time installing and setting up the printer. Since the printer was hooked to the ethernet and not directly to the computer we had to switch the printer's IP to static.

Thursday 10/6: Unboxed and distributed new computers to the rooms that needed it. The computers were all Win7 Dell computers. Since it was all preconfigured all I had to do was to make sure it did not automatically log on by making sure the users had to Ctrl+Alt+Del to log in. There were some old PC's I needed to remove from the classrooms.

Friday 10/7: After removing all the old PC's, Rm119 had a problem where a computer could not play DVDs. The issue was 1) the computer didn't have any software that could play the DVD 2) the computer was incredibly slow and lagged a lot 3) the computer still used Windows2000. I tried installing VLC on the computer but it still would not play the DVD. That computer just needs to be replaced. I also had another printer issue where the new Win7 computer did not have the printer driver already on it. I had to use an alternate driver but to get that alternate driver I needed to use Windows Update, but the techco account did not have sufficient privileges to run Windows Update. After contacting Mitch, the best solution seemed like hooking the printer to an older XP computer. I did learn a nifty little trick where the printer queue was stuck on "deleting."

1)I ran cmd and typed in "net stop spool" which stopped the printer spool. 2)Run "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\spool\Printers" 3)delete all files within that folder 4)go to cmd and run "net start spool"

This seemed to fix any stuck print jobs. Deleting the files will not harm the computer. source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946737

Tuesday 10/11: I fixed another printer problem by switching to USB cable. I also organized the cabinets with all the computer accessories by removing many unneeded parts for assset disposal.

Thursday 10/13: I installed the software and driver support for the Promethean ActivBoard in Rm215. I installed a boardmaking program for a teacher after several attempts to log in to techco. The problem was faulty internet connection due to a weak signal (counselor's room).  There was also two computers in the lab that Sara wanted me to look at. One had a hard drive problem (A) and another had apparently a video card problem (B). I ran a hard disk diagnostic on the computer with the hard drive problem and it returned a  error code 7.

Fri 10/14. Some manual labor on the two computers. I switched the the video card to see if that would help. It didn't. B still had the issue where after the initial Dell loading screen, the monitor would go blank. The power was still on and the monitor was hooked up because its  power sign was green but there was no image. B also did not have a hard drive problem because I ran a hard disk diagnostic on it. It seems like the hard drive on A just failed so we could just replace the hard drive and salvage the computer.