Computer Problems

1. 14 PCs brought back from New Life were reported to have problems including powering down unexpectedly.
2. Windows 2000 OS disk provided by the site failed to install properly.
3. Site purchased a printer without a network card.
4. PCs did not recognize each other during attempts at network configuration.
5. One PC on site ran extremely slow, then failed altogether.

Solutions

1. Group spend two weeks running tests on the hard drives, memory, and CPU.  No clear cause was determined for the problems.  Concluded that the motherboards were shoddy and stripped PCs down.  Hard drives, disk drives, and all other viable components were recycled back into a new set of donated PCs that were refurbished for use at New Life.
2. Observe…think…plan…test…bang head… Martin did stuff…try to install on a different PC…Eureka!…repeat… Yeah, we’re still not sure what the source of the trouble was.  (We hate computers.)
3. New printer was hooked up to a single PC, and remaining PCs were networked and configured to share the printer.
4. It was eventually determined that the Zone Alarm firewall software was blocking the PCs attempts at sending information to each other.  IP addresses and Subnet mask were entered into Zone Alarm to allow all PCs into the “Trusted Zone” at which point the PCs were able to recognize each other and share information.
5. The problems with speed were due to a lack of adequate memory (an error on our part).  Numerous attempts to re-load the OS, including switching out the hard drive and other components were unsuccessful.  It was decided to remove the PC from the lab.  Our best guess at this point is a problem with the motherboard, as we were unable to access BIOS.