Saturday, April 2, 2011

MIssion Accomplished!

I met my goal of having all 28 BTOP computers out for public use by March 31. Woohoo! The transition has gone so well it's almost a bit of a let-down (but I'm not complaining!). Most comments from the public (and there haven't been that many) have been asking about the old equipment. Of course there are changes that could be made already: Firefox 4 has just been released! So the work is on-going. We plan a celebration in a week or so, after the MLA conference is done. Balloons, a little fan-fare just so everyone knows about the project.

Now that I had some free time I went to work on our "toddler" computer - just an old CPU running an entertaining screensaver, with unattached keyboard and mouse for the under-2 set to play with. Recently the CPU we were using started making some noise, so it seemed time to replace it (it didn't even have USB ports, that's how old it was!). The City sent over a newer CPU set up with just a basic user account, and I tried transferring some screensavers we'd downloaded on the other machine. Apparently I didn't have all necessary the files, because only one would install. But it looked wonderful on a newer machine that could handle the 3-D graphics! That was until the machine started freezing up with the dreaded Blue Screen. Restarting was easy but annoying for the Children's staff. Friday morning I started working on it, trying to get other screen savers downloaded directly on to it, but all had the same problem - Blue Screens after a short time. All day, and Saturday morning I tried a variety of ideas. Finally, after a discussion with the Saturday person working in Children's, we decided a basic Windows screensaver (the 3-D pipes) would be a good idea. Hopefully that will just run and run.

On to Billings and MLA!