Day 2: HP and Adobe

(Hours: 7:30am-5:00pm)

I started my day off at 7:30 again, and helped open up the Library and Tech. Department. After everything was open and turned on, I worked on some documentation for incoming students. The documentation was step-by-step instructions on things like creating accounts in their mail system, resetting passwords, and just general usage. Once I finished with testing & correcting those I went off to David Levine’s office.

We started off our day doing a bit of physical labor, collecting junk technology and putting them in one spot to make the pick up later this week easier. First to go was a giant old TV, then we headed down to the ­­­­Windy Hill Day Care. There we removed an old TV, some older pcs, and some CRTs. Back at our drop off spot we tested one of the machines & lcd displays and decided to keep it as it was still in working condition. After that we salvaged some RAM and a hard drive out of an older AMD computer, and piled up the rest of the technology waste. After that we headed back to David’s office.

I continued to work on the computer that’s going to create the image. Installing more updates, a few more applications, and fixed some general settings using the Local Group Policy tool. After that I stopped back over at the Tech. Department and did some work for them, cleaning some old hard drives. After that I went over to pick up two new HP computers from where we left them off yesterday.

I was tasked to update the computer, as well as install and uninstall various Adobe products. During this process David gave me a quick lesson on Citrix and the ‘thin clients’ that are all over campus. The ‘thin clients’ are very stripped down computers with an imbedded operating system on flash memory, and no hard drive. These ‘thin clients’ connect to Citrix using the local network. Everyone has a personal profile that is saved and delegated to various servers. There is one annoying problem David encounters with this system though, and that’s corrupted profiles. After a person logs off their profile should theoretically record any changes and log off that particular server that they were using, but this isn’t the case all the time. Sometimes the profile wont log off, and this will lead to a corrupted profile.

I continued to work on the two new HP desktops but I ran into some trouble. They had some complications connecting to the network, which was accomplice by out of date drivers. After an install of the latest drivers they seem to be connecting, but still aren’t acting 100% normal. There was also a problem with an unknown PCI serial port that was showing up in the Device Manager, this was fixed by more drivers… To top it all off Adobe Acrobat was being finicky with licensing, but in the end it worked. The only thing left is to figure out why they are having connection problems with the network. Tomorrow should be another full day.

Post time: 5:37pm est.