Slow Computers

Last week was spring break, and I went away, so I did not go into Villa. This past week I worked three days for 12 hours. 

Villa has just over 100 computers and at least 80 of them are on wireless. Since we have added about 25 more computers in recent months the wireless has lost a lot of performance. To remedy this Mrs. Dow had a second wireless LAN added to keep the computer lab desktops from bogging down all of the 2nd floor access points. This was finished on Monday so I went and switched all of the computers in the lab to this new network. 

One of the old laptop computer carts was acting very slow so I checked it out and it was definitely not performing correctly. I ran the entire system and bios tests to check to hardware and there were no problems. There was no apparent problem within windows to be causing the slow down so I am going to do a clean format of it next week; I had been meaning to do a clean install on one of those laptops to get a good ghost image for future problems anyway. 

One teacher has had Vista installed on her laptop since the beginning of this school year and it has performed absolutely terrible for her. Mrs. Dow really wanted to start rolling Vista out since XP is becoming harder to get on new computers so I have been working this semester to get the performance up on it. For the new laptop cart we just implemented, Vista has been great but for the teachers' purposes it is not good enough. Teachers do a lot of work off the network and Vista bogs down badly when working of the network. I have enough knowledge of Vista to shutdown many unnecessary features and functions to get it to perform as well as XP off the network, but not on the network. With Mrs. Dow's new computer still not in she has been using one of the computers with Vista on it. She has been able to give good feedback to me other than: "vista is slow." She discovered it was only when working on the network, in particular with documents on the network, in which Vista was slow. I went online a researched this problem and discovered there is a problem with Vista and networking triggered from some anti-virus software. I shut down our Endpoint on her computer and it helped a lot, but still not all the way.  I had already streamlined Vista with shutting down as many features as possible so I am at a loss for what to try next. Moving forward we decided to give the teachers which have, or were going to have, Vista windows XP. I got one of the laptops converted over and will do the other one next week.

The principal's new hard drive, after a lot of tinkering with ghost, still would not reimage so I will either try partition magic to do a straight clone from the old drive to the new one or I will do a clean install next week. 

One of the eighth grade teacher's projector wasn't working properly so I took a look at it. When she switched it on it would flicker and she had to jiggle the cord to get it clear. Mrs. Dow mentioned she thought the VGA port might be bad on the laptop so I looked at that first. When I checked it I noticed it was jiggling the end of the cord plugged into the wall not the computer that fixed the problem. I pulled the wall plate off and saw the cord was loose in the junction box so I tightened it up and it seemed to be working fine now. I also switched her VGA cable out completely just for good measure.

Mrs. Dow asked give the dance teacher, who finds a new complaint with her laptop every week, a desktop she had in the back of her lab. That was a really simple swap; I just moved it down into her office and set her printer up and it was up a running for her. That desktop is a good solid computer so hopefully this will be the end of that saga.

Mrs. Connelly, the librarian, was now set up with Adobe Premiere to work on her video editing but her computer was slowing down severely when she went to edit her recently shot videos. The program itself was unresponsive and very slow and the video playback was not synched and the audio lagged badly. After some research, and a lot of exploring within Premiere, I discovered that it was just the .MTS format that was showing this; .AVI and .MPEG ran as good as could be expected on a laptop. I found .MTS is a high definition video format and found her version of Premiere was, in fact, compatible. So I thought one contributing factor was that she was working with source files located on the server so I switched them to a local folder and that fixed the programs unresponsiveness, but the video still couldn't playback correctly. I then updated her codec’s and check the playback of the videos in windows media player and they were fine. The last thing I tried was to install premiere on a desktop and see if the playback in premiere was any better and it was not. For a quick fix I suggested converting the files to .AVI, so she is going to work with them in that format until I can fully identify the problem. 

Next week I hope to fix all of these problems rather then run into an endless list of them I found myself doing this week.