I'll begin this epilogue with a brief background of my experience with computers as to further elaborate my position. My father is experienced with computer parts, repairs and programming and has been my main exposure to computers ever since I was a small child, although most of the information that I retain is what I've found through my own trial and experience. With all of the exposure I've received as a child, I think it would be safe to assume that is what made me, although understated, a computer enthusiast. Now, without further adieu, we'll elaborate the story of a Computer Engineering Class through the eyes of a "product of the Internet Generation".
Week 1 and 2, safety weeks. When I chose Intro to Computer Engineering it was a mixture of interest and elimination, as there were barely any acceptable classes to choose from for my semester and I'd rather choose a class where I was familiar and might learn something interesting than having a class I'd despise assigned to me, which usually would include a business class. It was my expectations to go in-depth with computer parts and functions, but as only an Intro Class was open I probably should of known we'd be covering the basics. The whole week and the week after we spent covering safety procedures and the dos and don'ts of computer repairing, concerning what to do so you won't damage the computer or hurt yourself. I wouldn't say that the lessons were common sense, but they were pretty close. Things in the booklet were covered on the test, such as wearing an anti-static wristband as to not have the 1 in a million chance of damaging a computer part while working inside of it. In the second week we covered self-safety while lightly covering procedures for disposal inside of MSDS and accidents. For the most part, hazards were covered; like sharp pieces, high voltage capacitors in the power supply and CRT in the monitor, leaving wires in a pathway exposed, burning yourself on hot parts, or damaging your eyes from the laser emmiting pieces. In my opinion though, whoever decides to take apart a powered printer, drive, or fiber optic cable, without knowing what they're doing, deserves the sequential. Again, expected for Intro, but still a WAY better choice than the other few available classes.
With the safety objective over we finally began our long decent into the bulk of the class, after a brief explanation of the computer parts, of course. I've already taken computers apart before, so I knew what I was doing, but some of my class mates were horrible with the parts, although the total lack of interest on their part could have been an important factor. So after nearly a semester of taking the computer apart and putting them back together, we are told to seperate into teams and create a working computer out of the 3 obviously broken ones. With some mild mix and matching, about the same amount of work as a elementary school-er would use while fixing a jigsaw puzzle, my team produced a computer that would boot up and load all the way to the intro screen. We did, however, have an issue as the back USB ports didn't recognize the mouse and keyboard. Although we didn't think they were broken we tried a different mouse and keyboard, after shuffling around the tied down computers on the desks, and then tried it on the front and determined it was an error with the back ports. Fridays are so exhilarating.
Monday, sometimes a new unit, sometimes a continuation. So, with my team's computer finish and some of the mediocre work out of the way, me a couple from my team go are told to help out the other team and create a working computer out of their 3 computers. I've already seen the condition of the ones they had to work with and I already knew it would be a pain. So, we all begin with me as an anchor, and take apart all 3 computers and lay the parts down to compare them. Either it was the people that worked on them or the starting condition, because those parts were mangled. The connecting IDE pins for 2 of the motherboards were bent and all 3 analog slots were either torn up or bent, so we used the motherboard with straight pins and tried to bend the analog back to make things easier. The CD drives were all in good condition so we just picked a random one and went with that, although there were only 2 floppy disk drives and one had bent pins. One of the only two hard drives was screwed up as well, so we had to use that. It's weird that their computers were missing so many parts. After rearranging most of the working parts and some sketchy ones together we get a power error and it would boot up at all, so instead of trying to fix the motherboard itself we got a couple people to switch the parts into another casing, in-case it was an error in the immovable parts; but we ended up using tweezers to straighten out the bent pins in one of the better conditioned remaining motherboards and switched them out. So with a mildly decent motherboard, we plugged in the computer and received a BIOS error, we just ignored and kept going. The problem was something with it's reading, most likely one of the cables were damaged, but the computer was in well enough condition to where they received a grade for the project.
With a lot of the hardware objectives out of the way, we began to start with maintenance software; such as disk defragment, disk cleanup, or disk checks. There wasn't much of a problem finding them as they're all together, either in hard drive properties or system tools in the program menu's accessories. I never really used those tools that much, my computer never really needed a lot of maintenance. Only once in a long while I had to clean up my computer, but the ways to do that are pretty easy to understand and find, if you fool around with the system's menus a bit. Cleanup does as it says and removes a lot of the junk files on your computer, defragment takes files and puts them back into solid groups whenever they save in separate locations, and check just makes sure everything is there and working in your hard drive. All in all, the preventative maintenance chapter was just a short take on the instructions on how to use the tools, and what they do.
Barely more than a month of weekdays and then summer break starts, and we took a mild lapse in activity between the preventive maintenance chapter and whatever chapter we do next. We were doing things like current events, reports on countries, and technology advances in certain fields.
