Day 5: The Spectrophotometer

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

I began my day at 7:30 today, and opened up the Technology Department and library. I started to get a routine down and I start on the bottom floor and work my way up, turning on things as I go. After that I headed to David’s office to begin some more imaging work. Colby Sawyer decided to go with Office 2010, and so it was put on the Windows XP imaged machine, after Office 2007 was uninstalled.

I started to work on a new image today, this time it’s with a much newer operating system Windows 7. I’m working on an HP rp5700, which is a bit faster than the Evo I did the XP image on. I got an all ready made, and fairly up to date build notes, so the setup is coming along pretty fast. There were a few programs on the build notes I needed to replace with newer versions, but besides that much of it was left unchanged.

After some imaging I went with David over to the Science Department. The water quality-testing lab just got a new Spectrophotometer and needed some help installing new software. The program was very simple to install, and it was finished in a few minutes. The actual Spectrophotometer machine connects to the computer using a COM port, the woman whom works there bought a COM cable from the manufacture, but she bought it for around $55. This seemed like a ridiculously high price for a simple COM cable, a sort of outdated system. David and I decided to stop by the Tech Department and Server Room. We found a perfect Female-Female COM cable in the server room.

We plugged the COM cable into the spectrophotometer but we got an error in the software that there was no device connected. After a chat with the distributor of the spectrophotometer, it turns out the COM cable needed was very specific and wasn’t a basic COM cable. We disconnected and opened up the $55 cable and it worked just fine. The computer recognized the device, and the software ran fine.

After that I went over to meet Art, they got two new servers in and he wanted me to help him set them up. The servers were fairly small, and all we needed to was rack and connect them. After putting on some metal railings and taking out an older server, they just slid right in. The hardest part was finding enough Ethernet connections and power for each of them. Between the two servers we needed 4 Ethernet cables and 4 power cables.

The power cables were the easier part, finding 4 connected Ethernet cables was a little tricky. We ended up unplugging cables that weren’t active on a switch and replacing them with the ones connected to the new servers. We also ran into another problem after they were all connected. These new servers had no media drive, and so the provided CD’s couldn’t be used to install software. And so we are leaving that as is, until we get a USB CD-ROM drive.

Once I finished with Art I stopped back over at David’s Office and finished up the Windows 7 image computer. The new image came a long pretty quickly and I finished almost everything with out any issues. The only problem I ran into was with a registry hack that enabled Windows 7 to show file extensions on the Default User. There needed to be a new Dword value entered into a registry key, but that key was non-existent. We tried adding the key, and activating a key in a different section. Both didn’t work, and we decided to give up on this registry problem. I then went on the set Windows Update to allow non-adminstrator users to download and install them. In no time it was all ready 5:00 and my day was over.

Post time: 5:55pm est.