Back to School

Yesterday I spent the day at Emily and Sophie's school! Not to study, but to try and salvage as many working computers from a pile of old second-hand (scrapped) machines. With a new school year starting and with new admissions the sharing rate for the machines was 2-3 pupils so they were needing more computers. With the school being very small and privately funded thay used old business cast-offs for their hardware.

There were 28 machines to go through, ranging from old Pentiums to Pentium IIIs and had all sorts of Operating Systems installed (Win 95, Win 98, Win NT, Win 2000 and Linux). As most of the machines being used at the school were still Win 98, that is what we decided we would stick with, however, most machines had win 2000 on and the password was unknown so I am going to have to attempt to wipe win2000 and install win98 (I took a machine home to give it a go). Looking in the newsgroups it doesn't sound like its an easy job...but I always like a challenge.

By the end of the day I had 5 working machines that were networked and ready to go, which was lucky as one of their current machines packed up while I was there so I swapped it for one of the salvaged ones.

Hopefully if I can de-install win2000 and get win98 working, they should get at least another 6 working machines.

It was interesting being at the school all day, I sat in the headmasters classroom where the older children are taught. It sounded like a fun class (didn't understand anything as they were talking Franch). During the breaktimes I saw Emily playing , which was nice.