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.