• We’ve learned how to ascertain if the power supply is bad. We replaced 3 different power supplies on 3 different computers. It actually worked all 3 times. To determine if it is the power supply we have to confirm that all the connections are good and that nothing else is the problem.
• We learned how to find drivers.
• We like our Gateway computers.

Ruth’s summary of Events in East St. Louis (for the group)

Adventures in East St. Louis.

• Due to the weather delays we did not get to East St. Louis until mid afternoon on Friday. When we got to our site the pastor of the church met us, and we were pleased to find that they had a printer, stuff to set up dsl, and new wiring for the computers. We were also one group member short at this point because Sharon had not been able to come to Champaign because of the weather. She arrived in East St. Louis about a half hour after we did.

We began be moving the computers and supplies into the room. This was a somewhat treturous task due to the amount of ice. Once the computers were in the room we began arranging them trying to get them organized. I realized that as much as we knew generally what to do it would have been better if we had had a more detailed installation plan.

After a little bit of testing we also learned that the new wiring in the room was not functional yet, so the pastor brought us an extention cord and box with four plugs so that we could run the computers from the existing power in the room. We were able to get all of the computers in a place and turned on. (We could not run them all at once due to the lack of power.) After that we ran the network cable to the various computers and back to the hub. We could have been more orderly about this because we had to move a few cables when we realized that had plugged the wrong ones into particular computers. We found that we had one monitor that would not turn on and one that looked weird.

• My (Ruth’s) goal for the day was to make sure we had the information that we needed for the next day. That meant that I wanted to make sure that we knew if we needed to download the drivers for the printer. I checked and found that the computer did not automatically detect it, so I knew we would need to get the drivers for that. While I was working on that my group members checked that the computers powered on and made sure the icons were arranged in the same order.
• Before we could get any farther, we were called and told that the roads were getting icy and we might want to head back to the hotel soon. We left almost immediately after that.
• The next morning we attempted to download the driver, but because I was running late we were not successful. Sharon and Tom went over to the site, and Sarah and I came after attempting to download the driver.

When we got to the site we were told that the new wiring should be working, so we set up the computers, plugged them in, and started to turn them on. After we had a few powered on we heard a loud noise and smelled smoke. All of the new wiring no longer worked at that point, and when the pastor looked in the fuse box he found that all of the fuses had been blown. The pastor then reset things and began to check the out.

We decided at that point to use the old wiring with the extention cord and box from the day before. As I was plugging the first computer into that there was a small explosion in the power strip and it started smoking. That was rather startling for me because I was right next to the power strip when it happened. After that I determined that we should make sure that everything was unplugged and wait until Martin got there to plug anything in again. We also called Martin to let him know that we needed him to come soon.

Martin said that he was planning to come to our site directly. He was loading up some monitors to bring over.

Pastor Temple was still testing things to try to figure out what was going on. He and Tom tested all of the new wiring with a vacume cleaner that was running. The new wiring seemed ok. He then had Tom test a power strip plugged into the new wiring with the vacuum that created another small explosion and smoke. At about this time Sarah decided to try calling her husband Ethan who is an Electrical and Computing Engineer.(Correct that to what ever Ethan technically is please.) She was not able to reach him immediatly, so I called my father and told him what was happening. (He has done some wiring at our home and knows the basics.) I felt lost at this point because things that worked the day before were no longer working, and I don’t have enough knowledge about how wiring is done in interact with the pastor. My father was able to give me a better understanding of what might be going wrong, and it was useful to describe the problem to him, because I then described the problem again to Martin. Sarah tried calling Ethan again and this time she was able to get ahold of him.

Martin arrived, and I met him outside and described the problems that we were having. He then went inside and talked to the pastor. As he and the pastor looked over the situation Sarah described the problem to Ethan who had some ideas of what might because the problem. He spoke with Martin, and then Martin and the pastor were able to work through the problem and determine that. The ground and neutral were not wired correctly,so there was current running through the ground. Martin and Pastor Temple were able to fix this relatively quickly after they determined what the problem was.

• We also had a problem later on where a wire was loose which caused us not to have the power we needed to power more than one computer. Martin was able to help us debug this issue and then the pastor was able to fix it relatively quickly. Then we powered up the some of the computers were not working. I assigned Sarah, Sharon and Tom each a computer to get it working because we three that were not working. They got them working pretty quickly.
• We were then able to get the internet and printer working, and leave them with 7 working computers due to all the power issues Dopey’s power supply.
• Once things started working it took us about two hours to get everything working. We were able to explain the system to them. And leave them a working computer lab.