Starting a New Year

This is the first post of my new work year. Hopefully, keeping up with my daily activities will go better this fiscal year than last.

We were out Monday for the 4th of July holiday.

Tuesday (up to 11:35am) - Swapped out core switches in upstairs closet. Downstairs closet will be completed once I receive the missing rack mounts from the manufacturer. After that, I began work on a laptop that has Windows 7 Home Premium installed. I tried to update to KMS code we have for the co-op. That did not work at all.

I purchased a Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade from Microsoft. The license number works, but the upgrade itself failed several times with no helpful error at all (just says failed). I decided to download/install any outstanding updates to see if that has any bearing on the update at all. once of the updates is Win7SP1, and I have a feeling that might be a prerequisite for the upgrade. Who knows.

During this, I have been talking with our early childhood director about moving a smart board from one school location to another district.

12:15pm - Update on Win7 Upgrade: The Service Pack 1 install seems to have done the trick. Following the SP1 install, I tried the Anytime Upgrade and it eventually siad, "downloading 2 updates" which it had never said before failing before this. After all that was said and done, the machine rebooted a couple times as it installed/updated various files, etc. After that, though, Windows 7 welcomed me with the "Windows 7 Professional" script at the bottom of the logon screen! Tip: Make sure you are at Win7 SP1 before trying to Upgrade!

I met with a couple techs from Prescott for lunch. After lunch, I spent the afternoon running COMBOFIX on every computer in the distance learning lab and in the APSCN lab.  Some machines had infections, most did not.

I am still having a VERY frustrating issue with my network jumping from 3Mbps down to 28k then back up again.  So far, I can't find any rhyme or reason for it, but according to DIS, the problem is local.  I'm not sure that's true. I cannot help but think this is a telco connectivity issue. Until I can prove it, though, I have to keep plugging away.

Thursday

Busy day so far today. It is roughly 10:00 am, and I've had two conference calls and a CIV test. I met with the Early Childhood Coordinator regarding the installation of cameras and Skype for her teachers. The plan is to use Skype for parent meetings in order to avoid the driving from our main office to the school sites when face-to-face is not necessarily imperative. It looks VERY promising! I also made the appropriate modifications to the bosses' bookcases in order to hook up their LCD TVs. Once the TVs were hooked up, I fielded a call from Blevins regarding a non-deleting icon. That was an interesting adventure.

Evidently, the user dragged a message from Groupwise onto the desktop, thinking it wuold save a copy of the message. Instead, it created a .GWI file that would do nothing. When the user tried to delete it, it wuld not delete and instead get caught in an infinite "deleting" loop.

After a bit of research, and trial and error, I came across a post about a program I had forgotten about: Unlocker. Unlocker is a great tool that will show you what process(es) are holding the selected file(s) and then give you options to rename, remove, etc. You can find it here: http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/

Once Unlocker was installed, we selected "Delete" from the drop-down and then played it safe with the least intrusive option (I cannot recall the exact wording). Ultimately, though, they got the same inifinte loop until they clicked the "Kill Process" button. As soon as they did, the icon disappeared and the process stopped! Excellent!

I had used unlocker before, though I cannot remember what the circumstance was. Now, I've used it twice with great success!

Let's see what the rest of the day holds.

Talked with the local cable company regarding pricing and installation. They will send a letter of proposal and we can decide from there whether or not we want the service.

I am also looking into using a dish-based service.

Received a call from Prescott's early childhood program - her main computer died. It seems all of these out-of-warranty Dells that the ECH programs have are dying lately. Not good! I'll be heading there Friday to swap out computers.

Fielded calls from Blevins regarding USB issues on several computers and regarding sites blocked by the state content filtering system.

Took care of general office duties as usual.

Near the end of the day, I decided to try and set up the security camera system for email notifications (that is, notify me when an 'event' happens).  Still working on that one.