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

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2011/1/21

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

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

<strong>The School: </strong>Reavis

<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Tech General, Helping Teacher

<strong>Main Report or Narrative: </strong>So since there aren't any other really big projects to do at Reavis, I spent this entire week tying up loose ends in various classrooms and things. A lot of rooms have just really slow computers, but I focused more on the broken stuff first.

So first 214. That computer is like Greenspan. He lures you into buying mortgages (aka fixing it up nice and clean) with low interest rates, and you think everything is going to be all fine and dandy. Then he gets ugly and raises interest rates (aka punches you while you're trying to get it to work properly). It was just a never ending source of problems. I guess I'll enumerate them:

1) Network Card: Yeah it acted up again. I ended up using Windows's native wireless utility to make it work, but the problem is that I didn't realize that the card's utility, when it installed, disabled a vital Windows service to make it work on other accounts. It took me a while to figure this one out.

2) CPS remediation script sucks? - The computer now apparently loves to hang up right after logging in, BUT ONLY if you don't move the mouse or anything and let it sit there. I'm not sure what's up, because Windows isn't recording any errors in its logs. It started happening after I tried to boot up Windows again after canceling the CPS remediation script that I opened last week. Lesson learned: Kill the CPS. (Ok maybe a little extreme ;))

3) Microsoft Office Installation funkiness - Wow now this one wasn't really a problem, it was just annoying. I tried to install Office at least 7 times. The first time I wasn't on an administrator account, so that was reasonable. I logged onto techco, same thing, except it froze up during installation. This happened 2 more times. Then on the 5th try, an error popped up that said "some third party elements didn't install". I assumed that meant that nothing had installed, but in fact everything in office had installed, save some other random components that didn't matter. So I kept on uninstalling and reinstalling without noticing... Sigh. I never did get those third party elements to install though :P

Overall I think I spent something like 3-4 hours of my week in that room on that one computer. Sigh.

So in other news, Ms. Alverado found a bunch of mice, which was AWESOME because I could get some more computers up and running. Unfortunately the lack of WiFi cards is still a problem, though they ordered them. I wonder how long they'll take to come in... That laptop cart hasn't yet so...

Anyway, because I got mice, I could set up the computers in room 205. There were 3 computers, and only the middle one didn't have WiFi, which was a pleasant surprise (I didn't bother checking for cards earlier). Unfortunately the one on the left was pretty slow, and I'm not sure as to why. I tried some cleanup things, but in the end I think it was still pretty slow. I might have to reinstall Windows or something. The other two worked fine though.

Also, that class is pretty terrible... Probably the worst one in the school :/

Anyway, I also set up a new computer in room 203. Unfortunately space is rather limited in that room, and all of the rooms in that wing are set up so there are basically only two outlets: By the teacher's desk and by the door where there's no space because of a giant wooden shelf that's stuck to the floor. Great.

I pulled a computer from 202 that had WiFi, and set it up. I tried to install some RAM into both that computer and the teacher's computer (they were both pretty slow), but even at 768 MB, I didn't see too much of an improvement. Although granted, I didn't actually get to install the RAM on the teacher's computer since I ran out of time. I'll have to get to that room again.

I tried playing with the printer in room 201 again, and I think I'll just give up on it. I think Terry was right when he said that the roller on the bottom was broken, as pages just don't want to go in and up into the printer. Since it's old, it's out of warranty, so fixing it might get pretty expensive. We'll see though.

Another thing is that I tried playing with the old Pentium III computer in the Music room (2). It also felt impossible to speed up. I get the feeling that all of the computers in Reavis need a RAM upgrade at least, and a fresh install of Windows or something, because I'm just unsure of how to tweak the computers so they can get faster by themselves. Also, I don't think I've come across any computer that has more than 256 MB RAM yet, except for some teacher's computers. But for the most part, it's 256 MB RAM. There are a bunch of spare 512 RAM cards from the busted computer lab computers, so I'm thinking of distributing those out. The only thing is that it really hurts my and fingers trying to get them in. I so wish there was a better way to doing it :(.