Week 9

On Monday, I went to scan more papers including student’s requests to fix their computers. When I got back Ryan, Scott, and I went to Loyola to get more monitors and keyboards. They had enough towers in the Help Desk and were running out of monitors. They explained to me that this was the first year that they offered the computers that they no longer used to the faculty. Therefore, they hoped that next year, they will have a better technique in knowing what works and what doesn’t, and maybe they wont have to transport all of the computers to the help desk to get checked. When we got back, I helped Ryan put the monitors and keyboards away. By the time we were done, it was time for me to leave.

On Wednesday, Ryan and I went to bring even more monitors to the Help Desk. He told me that hopefully that will be the last of transporting monitors; because he thinks that the amount that we brought to the Help Desk today is all they need. When we got back to the Help Desk, we started checking that the monitors worked, until Ryan got a phone call from Brian in Financial Aid. We headed up to Financial Aid while he explained to me that Brian was having a problem sending out an e-mail because it kept telling him that it was too big. Ryan told me that it could be a problem of saving e-mails in Outlook and not in his Z Drive. When we got there, Brian explained to us that he was trying to send a 13 Kilobyte e-mail to first 8 staff members, and then to about 430 students. We told him about saving e-mails in the Z Drive, but he told us that this would not be possible because the e-mail that he was trying to use is a departmental e-mail. This meant that if he were to save e-mails to his Z Drive, only he would be able to see it. He then decided to go through the e-mails and erase whatever was not needed. He erased a lot of e-mails including the e-mails in the deleted folder and the sent folder. This made a lot of space, but when he tried sending the e-mails just to the 8 staff members, it did not go through. After looking at it for a while, Ryan thought that their e-mail did not have enough space to handle so many e-mails. He checked it again and tried sending the e-mails. He noticed that there would be one confirmation e-mail for each e-mail sent, then a return e-mail for each as well, and finally a copy of each e-mail in the sent folder. This meant that there were a lot of 13 Kilobyte e-mails in Outlook that took up space, and a reason why Brian could not send his e-mails. Ryan told Brian that his only option was to call Joe or Dave to request more space in their Outlook. Brian called Dave and told him his problem. Dave decided to see if he could give them more space and told him that he would get back to him. Ryan also talked to Dave and in their conversation Dave told him that he would try to give him more space if only at least for half an hour while Brian sent out his e-mails. Then in the meantime he would try to figure out how to give them more space. We were then waiting for Dave to call back in a few minutes so that Brian could e-mail it once again and see what would happen. By that time, however, it was already time for me to leave.

Week 8

On Monday, I went with Faith, Ryan, and Scott once again to get monitors, towers, keyboards, and mice to bring back to the Help Desk to get them ready to give to faculty members who have bought a computer. It was also to check what works and what doesn’t so they know the exact amount of computers left to sell. When we got back, Faith showed me a laptop where she was going to run different antivirus software programs to check for anything corrupt. She ran Norton first, and then she scanned the computer with Ad-Aware, which is a spyware program. She explained to me that she could not run both software programs at the same time because it confuses the programs and does not catch everything. While that was going on, Ryan got a phone call from someone in the Student Affairs office because there was something wrong with her Outlook Express. On our way there, he explained to me that he thought her problem was probably that she was saving all of her files in Outlook, which saves everything in an exchange server, which only gives each person a limited amount that they can use. Instead, people should save files and e-mails on their Z Drive because it gives them more space. He explained to me that in order to do this, he would have to create a Personal Folder in Outlook that saves things onto the Z Drive. When we got there however, we found out that her problem was a different one. The message that she kept getting was that she had no more space in her Z Drive, which Ryan said was not true. He said that this was the first time ever that he had seen that message. He therefore decided to create another Personal Folder for her in which she could keep the most recent e-mails. She would start working from this personal folder, and if she ever needed anything from the previous years, she could still access her first Personal Folder. Ryan explained to her that he had never seen that message and that they would go with that for now to see if it works and lets her save things onto that folder. In the meantime, he said he would talk to Joe about it and see if he knew anything about that problem and get back to her if the problem continued. While we were there, it seemed to be working fine by the time we left. When we got back, it was 11 and time for me to go.

On Wednesday, once again we transported monitors and different computer hardware back to the Help Desk. Since the weather was getting much better, they decided to get as much as possible so that they would have to do the fewest trips possible when it would get warmer. Therefore, it took us a while to get back to the Help Desk. When we got back and found a place to put everything, Ryan and I went to Sister Bruno’s office because she was having a problem with opening Acrobat Reader. She was trying to open a pdf file from a website, and a message kept coming up saying that she needed to install the add-ons. We then proceeded to install that for her, and then checked to see if the file opened up. It opened, but what sister wanted was another section in the book, which according to her should have opened as well but was not there. She showed us in her hard copy book the section that she wanted. We went to the French website to see if we could find that section, however after looking at all the possible links and all the possible files to download, we could not find it. We told sister that we thought the company did not put that section on the website. She thanked us, and told us that she was going to call the company and find out where she could get it from or they were going to put it eventually in the website.

On Friday, I went with Ryan to the Treasurer’s Office, because someone was having a problem with her computer. Whenever she tried opening a Microsoft Office File it would lag for a while before opening. Ryan explained to me how he was unsure about what to do because he had never come across that problem. He told me that he had talked to Joe earlier in the week and he gave him a list of possible things that he could do. We went over with the list and set ourselves to find out what would work. The first thing he did was to find all of the temp files that had nothing in them and deleted them. Then, he went onto Internet Explorer and changed the disk space given for the temporary files to 50 because temp files should not be given so much space. After that, he looked for a file called normal.dot that is needed by Microsoft Word in order to run properly. He was looking for this file to change its name. He explained to me that by doing this, Microsoft Office would create another one since it would not find it, and this way making sure that it uses a file that is not corrupt. After doing all of this, we restarted the computer and checked to see if the files would open without a big lag. We checked many files, but found that there was still a lag. Ryan then went to the last option that he had which was to turn off the antivirus software. We then opened files again to see if that worked, and we saw that there wasn’t much of a lag. He explained to me that he did not want to do this option because he is now leaving the computer without antivirus software. He told her to work with the computer as she usually did for about half an hour to an hour to see of that did in fact help the lag, and if it did, he would install a McAfee, a different antivirus software. By the time we left her office, it was 10 in the morning and time for me to leave.

Week 7

On Monday, Faith, Ryan, and I started going to the “Computer Cemetery” to get more monitors and towers. We were bringing back as many as we could, but we only made the one trip because it was so cold. They needed these monitors and towers to check that they worked and then give it to the faculty members who want to buy a computer. I then went with Ryan to the CLL offices because they were having a problem accessing some of their Banner applications. He explained to me that they had an update, but that they had to do a little update of their own when they opened the applications. The reason why they would get confused though, is because it took a few minutes before a window appeared telling them that they had to make an update. So we showed them and helped them download the update. We then got back to the help desk, and I started checking to see if monitors worked or not and placing them in different piles. Then it was time for me to go.

On Wednesday, I went with Ryan to the Writing Center because one of their computers would not connect to the network. When we got there, he showed me again how to connect a computer to the network; it was like a little review. We also saw that the computer next to the one we were fixing, had a CD Drive that was half-way open. Ryan tried to close it but it would not close, so he opened the tower, showed me the inside of a computer, and took the CD Drive out. We were looking at it, but could not see what was wrong with it, so we decided to take it back to the Help Desk and take a look at it there. When we got back to the Help Desk, Ryan was trying to figure out what was wrong with the CD Drive, but he broke one of the cables by mistake. He then gave it to me to look at it so I could play around with it and figure out what was wrong with it until someone would call asking for help or if something came up. Faith then got a call from Joe telling her that she had to set up a new account for one of the ladies that work in the CLL office because her last name changed since she recently got married. Faith passed some of the folders and files that she used the most to her new account, and told her that she could still sign on to her old account if there was anything that she needed in the meantime. She also told her that Joe would eventually pass all of her files onto her new account and that she would e-mail Joe to remind him. I then went with Ryan to put a new CD Drive in the computer in the Writing Center. He showed me how to do it, and what cables I had to connect it to. Then we headed back to the Help Desk, and it was time for me to leave.

On Friday, there wasn’t much to do. I checked more monitors and cleaned them up. I asked them again about the websites that they used to help them out. They told me that the website that they used is google. They search what they need and it gives them a solution or an idea of what they need to do. They explained to me that they use google especially since they have a partnership with Microsoft giving them the most accurate information. Friday was a slow day

Friday was the Senior Ball, in a hurry I just pressed "Save Now" and not the "Publish Post" button. I just decided today to check if there were any comments and saw that this week was not published. Ooops!!! Well here it is now.