Practicum 1 Day 14: Dec 19, 2013

Today was my last day at Lifetime Learning Center. I really did enjoy my time there, I improved my skills a lot in certain areas such as software and I met a lot of very nice people. Most of my tasks were software related and a few were hardware related.

Today there wasn't really anything else we could do other than finish up on installing updates and installing any other software that needed to be installed. Lately David has been asking us to move a few desktops into the other room for maintenance and needed space in the room that they were previously in. So myself and Bryce had to move another desktop and a laptop into the room where David usually works.

Other than that our co-workers held a goodbye party to me and Bryce. I had a real good time there and I am really looking forward to my next practicum at Bargain Bytes.

David is getting in some new laptops early next year so myself and Bryce will probably be asked by David to come back and work on them for a few hours. I am glad about that because it will give me and Bryce some more hours for our practicum.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 13: Dec 18, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center we had the whole day to finish installing Microsoft Office and setting a Restore Point for the laptops that we got last Thursday. Near lunch break we also had our Final Assessment completed by our Instructor.

To start off the day I began to install Microsoft Office to one of the last Dell laptops that I wasn't able to get around to from yesterday. I also had a few other laptops and one desktop that I had to install it to and a few laptops that I didn't get around to installing a few programs onto them. We also set up a list of all the laptops to tell us and David what is on each laptop.

At around 12:00pm my Instructor came in, for our Final Assessment. We talked about how my skills have improved in the time of me being here and what I have learned and such. I also had to hand in my Final Assessment comment section paper.

Other than that today went by pretty fast with a few things to do, near the end of the day I helped David move his Windows XP desktop into the other room to make room in the office. We might upgrade it to Windows 7 Ultimate. Myself and Bryce will be taking a look at it tomorrow.

Tomorrow is my last day, so after that I will be moving onto my second practicum at Bargain Bytes and I will be continuing my Journal soon.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 12: Dec 17, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center for most of the day we started to install Microsoft Office 2010 onto the laptops. This took up most of the day because we had to wait for it to install and then we had to wait for the program to update. We also were able to fix the Wifi issue that we were having with 4 of the IBM laptops.

I started off the day with downloading Firefox, AVG and ccleaner to one of the laptops that we missed the previous day for getting all the programs onto it. I then ran ccleaner to clear the registry files. I was then later able to get Microsoft Office 2010 from Bryce and then we figured out that all of the laptops had the 32bit OS. So we knew that we had to install MS Office 32bit version onto them. I was able to get about 3 laptops done with MS Office 2010, I am hoping I will be able to finish the last few tomorrow.

David was able to figure out how to get the Wifi working on the IBM laptops and I was then tasked to put the mandatory programs onto them such as Firefox, AVG and ccleaner. We got 3 out of the 4 IBM laptops to work with Wifi. the other laptop's Wifi card is either dead or it doesn't have one.Near the end of the day David asked us if we could take another look at the Win 98 computer, we were kind of busy with the updates and a few other things so I hope that we can take a look at it tomorrow.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 11: Dec 16, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center it was a pretty quite day with our former co-workers finished with their practicums it was just me David and Bryce in our room today. We still got quite a few things done such as fully activating Win 7, installing updates and installing small programs such as Firefox and ccleaner.

There wasn't much for me to do in the morning I didn't start my routine till after lunch and I was able to get everything done. I started off with finishing installing some updates on 3 Dell laptops and also removing the passwords from them and also from the 4 IBM laptops. After Bryce had already basically setup AVG on all 7 laptops I did the finishing touches on them and doing anything that Bryce may have missed.

We also put in another order for 10 new laptops. And we will also be getting a couple sets of mice and some keyboards. I do hope that we will be able to get them in time before our practicum ends later this week. But if we can't then we might set up a day later at the end of the course to work on the laptops.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 10: Dec 12, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center was a super busy day. There was definitely something to do today. We had a shipment of laptops come in which they had Windows XP installed on them. We had to partition them and then we had to install Windows 7 Ultimate onto them. I really did enjoyed this day.

The day started off with David asking myself and Bryce to take a look at some of the laptops to see what type of drivers and the condition of what each laptop were in. I began with partitioning and installing 1/5 of the laptops that I had to partition and then install the Operating System. At my desk I at one point had my own laptop and 3 other laptops that I was working on. We had a lot of laptops that had to be plugged in and such.

I used the UBCD from a bootable USB drive that I used from when you used them in the course, it definitely came in handy today. Once it was finished partitioning I then used the Windows 7 bootable USB to download Windows 7 Ultimate. All in all it took some time to complete all 5 of the laptops that I worked on. At the end of the day we were able to get all 7 of the laptops with Windows 7 Ultimate fully activated on each laptop. We also looked at a few laptops that did not connect to the internet, we are guessing that they do not have a wifi card in them or the drivers are just not installed.

On Monday we will be finishing up this task by downloading Microsoft Office 2010 and a few other programs such as ccleaner, Firefox and AVG. I feel like today gave me some new skills with working on partitions and installing an OS on the device.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 9: Dec 10, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center I had a few things to do that took up most of the day. I had to help David with a Router issue that he was having with 2 different computers and I also helped Bryce out with a few little things with setting up a very long ethernet cable. I also took another look at the Windows 98 SE machine.

I was asked by Bryce to help him set up an ethernet cable that ran from the current room that we were in and then ran into another room down the hall. We did our best to cover it up so it didn't result into a tripping hazard. Right after that I took another look at the Windows 98 machine on getting some drivers working with the Mobile Disk Enclosed Data Storage device. I did find one that might work but then I bumped into another road block. The machine does not have any USB drivers installed or something like that. My USB would not show up once I plugged it into the machine. David told me that he has another disk that may work with it which I will be trying out on thursday.

For the rest of the day I was asked by David to help him get his old D-Link Wireless router to work with 2 different computers. We tried first with a slow Windows XP computer and the other computer we tried was his own Windows XP desktop. We were unsuccessful. David gave me a write up of DD-WRT, which is the firmware that is running on his router. I did some research on his router and it is a D-Link Dir 615 and it isn't that good without the firmware. I heard that the firmware is pretty hard to install and work with but it works great. I am also hoping to find time either on Thursday with this or on Monday.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) I will be going back to school for the day to take my First Aid Course and try to get my certificate. I am very looking forward to tomorrow to learn new things that I may of or may not have know before and I am very confident that I will do well.

At Lifetime Learning Center we do hope to get the Windows XP laptops in by Thursday and if we do then me and Bryce will be working on them putting on such things as Windows 7 and Windows Office and any other miscellaneous programs.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 8: Dec 09, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center we had a pretty slow day. I helped one co-worker with a few miscellaneous things and I helped David get a Windows 98 SE machine to work.

Right when I walked into the door the floor was fairly slippery and I bumped into a co-worker asking me to put up a sign on a door telling people to use the front door. It was a pretty hard task. "Sarcasm". Today was also another day that we had to move a few things around to get the office to have more space to walk around.

For the rest of the day myself and Bryce took a look at a Windows 98 SE machine. We had to reinstall Windows 98 and we ran into a few Hard Drive issues. Tomorrow I hope we can resolve or come to a solution of this issue.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 7: Dec 05, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center we had a bit of a busy day. Our instructor came in early this morning at around 9:00am. Myself, Bryce and David had a mid point assessment by our instructor. Myself and Bryce also had to edit some clips into a video of the Christmas Event that took place yesterday.

The day started off with my instructor giving me an  assessment of my overall work so far. There were some basic questions of what I have been doing to contribute to this organization and such. I also was asked if my work area has been cleaned and organized, I answered yes as of my work space is always organized as in the only thing I usually have to put away at the end of the day is my laptop.
I received a fairly good mark for my expectations and I felt that the interview worked out well.

Myself and Bryce spent the rest of the day working and editing the Christmas clips into a video. Bryce wanted to edit so I let him edit the main part of the film such as changing some sound and putting in the clips where they needed to be in the right place. I am also more familiar with the program (Camtasia) than Bryce so I was asked frequent questions about how to do different things and for the most part I was able to help. For my part I was able to make up an intro and outro for the video, which included little things like the person that was responsible for setting the whole thing up and with the LLC logo and a special thanks for everyone that attended the event.

I do feel that my editing skills have greatly improved with this project that I contributed to prepare. I do hope to do more in the future with this specific program.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 6: Dec 04, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center it was a bit of a different day. Myself and Bryce were asked by our co-worker intern to film the Christmas Event Party that she set had set up. There were plenty of people there and I didn't find myself out of place since there were so many co-workers attending. We had to film the speeches that everyone had. We also had other technical problems to fix.

It started of like any normal day for me. Such as looking for things to do and such. I was asked to check up on the Windows 98 computer that we were working on yesterday that had a motherboard issue. A new problem occurred with the RAM which supposedly died. We also helped out with carrying some book shelves from a house into a truck which were then delivered to LLC. Sure it wasn't IT related but we found that it was good to get some fresh air.

As I said before we finished off the day filming the Christmas Event. It was fairly long about 3 hours or longer. There were different events that took place as of speeches and singing and plenty of food to pass along. I will be editing the video in the incoming days with Camtasia. I find that it will be fairly simple to complete then we were asked to burn the video onto some DVD's. Other than that it was a pretty fun and eventful day.


Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 5: Dec 03, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center I spent some time helping David with a few things such as troubleshooting an issue with a motherboard and retrieving files from a HDD and then formatting it.

Today started pretty slow other than finally getting final touches finished on the laptop order. Which will be shipped to Lifetime Learning center late next week. I'm excited to get plenty of work done that during that day. I then was asked by David to retrieve some old Windows 98 files from an old HDD. It was really annoying at first on having to find the folder which contained them. Then David was able to move them off of the HDD onto another. I learned what exFAT is today which means Extended File Allocation Table. Me and David found that as a formatting option instead of wanting FAT32.

After me and Bryce worked on a troubleshooting issue with a motherboard from an old Windows 98 machine. It wasn't in good condition at all and brought up tons of errors saying that it could not boot or just not booting the OS. We then tried to boot it again and we bumped into; Verifying DMI Pool. Which was on the screen for probably a good hour. We then tried formatting the HDD on a different comp and it worked just fine then tried it on the Win 98 again and it didn't work. So we found out that there was no problem with the HDD. So we assumed after plenty of research that it might be the motherboard.

 Overall I found today a lot better than the previous. I hope to continue troubleshooting issues with that computer tomorrow.


Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F

Practicum 1 Day 4: Dec 02, 2013

Today at Lifetime Learning Center it was another one of those slow days with not much to do. For the next few days it may continue until we get delivered the 7 laptops that we ordered and then we will have some real work to do.

I spent the majority of the morning looking for things to do and asking people if they needed help. I was able to carry and move some boxes into a different room for storage. I then helped with the final order for what type of computer/laptop deals we were going to pick for the order. We decided on a Upgraded Desktop and Laptop along with a monitor and 7 Free Laptops that myself and Bryce will be tasked to upgrade them with Windows 7 and Microsoft Office. I am very looking forward to it since it will really test my skills. I do think that it won't be that hard since it is just looking for the right downloads for the software.

Near the end of the day we spent some time troubleshooting an old 2006 printer. I found it really annoying that we tried it with 3 different OS and it was still not able to work. We got it set up with a Win XP OS but the printer still has a few issues that I'm hoping that we will be able to figure it out.

I also hope to find out what that weird piece of circuitry is sitting in David's office is. He knows what it is and is testing myself and Bryce to figure it out.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,


Sincerely,


Brandon.F