March 23

Last week in class we had to try and fix computers that were intentionally broken. Our group unfortunately receive a broken monitor as well so we spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why our video was not working. It was quite funny. After that problem was taken care of with help from Darren, we managed to get the PC in working order.

The first problem we noticed was that it had a floppy disk in the drive. This usually interferes with the boot of the PC since they are often configured to boot from a floppy before the hard drive. Secondly, the PC had no RAM in the banks. We found the envelop it was hidden in and had a time trying to figure out the rank of the memory banks to get the machine to boot. Next we had to do some configuration in BIOS, detecting the hard drive and configuring the boot sequence.

After finally getting into windows, our task was to navigate to http://www.siue.edu website. We had to enable the network connection, set up services on the machine, and change some settings Darrin had fudged purposely in the network card. Overall I thought it was a good experience and look forward to class later today.

On the project front, I have added configuring mac mail and Thunderbird to my script. Will and Jarred worked on setting up a website last week so we can put scripts there instead of creating the videos, which we have little to no expertise in. I will be glad to hear feedback later in class on my scripts so I know what may need to be added to them before we finish off the project and start working on our PowerPoint presentation to ITS.