Like other groups, we’ve learned a lot about computers and troubleshooting skills in this class. In addition, we think the following lessons we learned in our project are vital, too:

• Be patient. Solving computer and network problems is time consuming, and requires a lot of patience. For example, when we looked for the right video card drives for our computers, we had to try one by one from such a long list of drives till we found the right one.
• Try various combinations. After trying one solution by another and you still can’t solve the problem, try to combine them. It worked pretty well when we tried to figure out the hard drive problem in one of our computers.
• Keep trying. Repeating yourself doesn’t mean you are stupid. Sometimes the solution doesn’t work at this time but works at another time. When we set up the network for our lab, we thought it was the computers not the switch that caused the computers couldn’t ping each other, because we connected two computers with a new switch and they still couldn’t ping each other, and when we connected a laptop directly to one of our computers the laptop could ping the desktop but the desktop couldn’t ping the laptop. Finally after we tried all the possible solutions and still couldn’t solve it, we changed the switch again, and it’s solved!
• Listen to everyone’s advice and do them. When our computers couldn’t ping each other, Martin and C’s aunt gave us various advices, which helped us so much.