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

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2010/11/12

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

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

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

<strong>Kind of Work:</strong>

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

Tuesday: I split up the work on Tuesday between examining (again) the computers in the computer lab and the teachers rooms. After a lot of part switching, I'm fairly certain now that the problem for the computers in the tech lab is the motherboard. I don't think anything can be done about those aside from a motherboard replacement, and then we might as well replace the entire thing. Anyway, the rest of the day was spent looking around various rooms. I mostly did work on the upper level near the computer lab. A lot of the rooms had pretty solid tech situations, though some rooms had some quirks. There was a printer in 217 that had no cables whatsoever. I couldn't find an ethernet port near it, and it had no print cables to directly connect it to any computer in the room. Other than that though, the tech situation in the room looked just fine. I then got a request from a teacher to check the music room computer, which I determined was just really, really old. It was a Pentium III which would definitely struggle since the teacher wants to do some music recording on it. I decided that it would be better to just replace the machine entirely, but held off on that because the inventory on all the rooms hadn't been finished yet. I then moved on to room 215, where apparently there were some computers in the back that were having trouble. I checked them all, and the only real problem was that none of them were connected to the computer lab printer, which I immediately fixed. I also connected the teacher's computer with the computer lab printer. However, I couldn't fix the third one from the left because it apparently didn't have internet.  The cause is apparently the wireless card, which refuses to start up. I didn't get any time to actually fiddle with it though, as I had to go.

Friday: I again spent the day fixing various issues in the area around the computer lab. Some teachers were uncertain about the state of some computers, which were mostly fine. I did encounter another weird printer situation in 213 where the printer had no power cord. I also connected the computers there to the computer lab printer. I couldn't work on the computer in 215 because the teacher was out for most of the day and the room was locked. For the most part I worked in 214, where I had two computers that had some issues. One computer apparently had a corrupted active desktop file or something, so I just deleted desktop.htt and reset the active wallpaper. The more concerning problem was that one of the machines apparently had an I/O parity error. I wasn't exactly sure what caused it, but I assumed that it had something to do with the RAM. I first opened the case up and switched out the RAM with some spare RAM from the computer lab, but I assumed that they were the same type of RAM when they actually weren't, so I had to reswitch the RAM with some other ones. I soon got it to work with one of the original RAM cards, but the other original one appeared to dislike the machine, and threw up the parity error when I tried to put both back in. I did switch it out with another RAM of the same type from another computer, and it ended up working with the original 2GB of RAM. The strange thing is that I put the supposedly malfunctioning RAM in the other computer to see if it was really corrupted, but the other computer ended up booting up just fine. I'm not sure what was up with that. Maybe there was some dust or something that got cleared out somehow or something.

The other thing I did was to check some thumb drives that Mr. Johnson gave to me. Apparently they weren't working, and when I booted them up, they both refused to read anything, instead calling the file system "RAW" with 0 available and used bytes. I assumed that the partition with all the data got corrupted somehow, and Windows wasn't reading it correctly. I tried to fiddle with it, but because Windows couldn't read the partition, I couldn't format the drive or really do anything to it. I didn't have any available tools there, so after trying to access the corrupted partition for a while, I gave up since I can't really fix it if I can't access it. I asked to take the flash drives home for the weekend since I actually have tools at home to maybe do something with it, but so far I haven't had a chance to take a closer look at them since I was out for most of Friday + Saturday.