TECHNOLOGY NEWS

The simulcast of the Frank Church Conference was a success. I would like to thank the Web Development Lab and University Television Productions for all their help in putting the conference live on the web.  I also wish to thank my assistant, Zachary, for his help with getting the equipment together and assisting with the actual production.  Although participation on the internet was small, we determined that the prospects for future simulcasts are good and that we had accomplished what we hoped to accomplish. 

After a few setbacks and delays, the upgrades to computers for the second year of the five-year plan are finally in progress.  The purpose of the upgrade is to convert existing 100/133 CPUs to 450Mhz, to increase RAM to 128 MB and to increase hard drive size, making more PCs PeopleSoft-ready.  This process is going smoothly and there appears to be no problems at this point.

The reported theft of RAM has, hopefully, made all of us more aware of our PC's security and value.  One clue to the missing RAM was a noticeable decrease in performance to the operators.  Another cause of decreased performance can be fragmented or full hard drives.  Running the defragmenting utility and deleting temporary files and internet caches are ways of improving performance.  The disk defragmenter utility is located in the Programs| Accessories|System Tools folder.  If you are not familiar with these methods, please contact me and I will be glad to assist you.  

A new antivirus software is available for check out from my office.  Installation is quite easy but you may have trouble uninstalling Dr Solomon first.  If you need help with this or want to install the new software, please contact me at x3816.

Zachary Snyder, Assistant