Week 29 (late)

Well this is late for a couple reasons, blogger acting buggy, internet going down, etc.

Last Friday was the first day this year where I have been at Rancho alone (so to speak, I am the only IT there but by no means the only person). I took a look at the list of things to do and started by trying to fix four computers, a dell optiplex, a pentium 2, and pentium 3, and and an e-machine (with a pentium 4 processor). To set these all up I had to run an ethernet cord through the ceiling down to a table in the center of the lab.

As it turned out the e-machine was completely fried (when you plugged it in you could smell that there was a problem, I mean that literally). The P2 and P3 would start up and however I could not find a way to get a display on the monitors, I looked up the BIOS beep code and and found that for both of them the video card was either mis-adjusted or not plugged in correctly. The P3 was easy to fix you merely had to adjust the placement of the video card and then tighten the screws to make sure that it would not go out of place. The P2 on the other hand seemed to be warped in some way (indicating a problem with the motherboard). Since fixing the P2 was beyond me and it was a poor computer to start I abandoned it.

As for the Dell Optiplex, I didn't have time to go more in-depth however it appears that the cd-drive is not working properly as OS disks that work fine with other computers are unable to install on it.