<strong>Your Name: </strong>Patrick Collins<strong></strong>

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2013/02/15

<strong>Day(s) worked or described:</strong> M W F (erase the letters for days you weren’t there)

<strong>Total hours for week: </strong>~8

<strong>The School: </strong>Ray

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

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

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Things have been progressing more or less as normal at Ray. The teacher in room 314 had some problem entering the BIOS password that Carter set up (I was able to enter it fine on multiple occasions, I'm not sure what the issue was exactly), so I took off that password, disabled the school5560 account on that computer, and set up another local account that the teacher could let her students use. I'm not sure how it worked out because there was someone else teaching a class in that room as I was setting it up. The teacher whose homeroom it was was very late showing up to the next class, so I left in order to not be responsible for a classroom full of 9 year olds.

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There seem to have been a few issues with printers dying or needing to be re-set up lately. The system we have now where printers in classrooms are plugged in to a parallel port on one machine that the other computers connect to is unfortunate because printers always need to be reconfigured when old machines (the only kind with parallel ports) die. I dunno if there's any nice solution to this, but if Ray ever wanted to buy new technology, printers would probably be a good place to start.

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After discovering the other day what bad capacitors look like and how frequent they are on old Dells, I've started throwing out machines with bad capacitors without trying to fix them. They seem to cause issues in the most strange, unpredictable ways that only get worse over time, and I figure it's better to recover a good HD and some RAM from one of the dying machines than send it off to a teacher who'll be driven nuts by its random lockups, etc.

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Also, while trying to fix an issue with a computer that was overheating, I accidentally ended up separating its processor from its heatsink. The machine seems to be cured of the issues that it had but now needs a new application of thermal paste. I don' t know if we'd have any lying around somewhere? I've heard that toothpaste is usable in the short term if not, and I'm tempted to try that.