Tuesday, September 9, 2003
Almond scone at home for breakfast. Met with Steve and Cindy to look at 9th floor proceedings. Windows are in for Joel's and Chris's offices. Student lounge is almost entirely painted. Worked on Cindy's computer. "Error updating msi database" message when attempting to upgrade McAfee 7.0 to 7.03.6000.0 led to a forum on mcafee.com and a tech asking people to e-mail with details. Within 20 minutes they sent back a link to a password-protected download of 7.03.6000.0 but I needed to uninstall on my own. The auto uninstall wouldn't work, so I'm left to uninstall manually, which is a tedious process involving manually deleting registry keys. Regrouped with Cindy on how she wants to proceed since she might be getting a new home computer within the next few days. Made a fix to the P3 schedule for Debrah, uploaded it, and sent the new copy to the printers. Lunch with Susie and Jeff who needed tips on installing DSL and wireless in their home. Met with Mike and Cindy to discuss phone and data migration details. Looked at Kristina's computer, which has Win XP Home and got infected with a virus. It refuses to connect to the Windows Update site because it thinks the WU components are unsigned. Even though I say yes, it puts me in a loop always asking me if I want to download and install ui-something. The computer seems to be free of viruses now but is crippled at least with respect to the Windows Updates. I'll suggest to Kristina tomorrow that she reformat the hard drive and install Win XP Pro. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp with bowties, garden greens salad. Figured out using Google why Microsoft Outlook takes a long time to start up: needed to uncheck "Enable Instant Messaging in Microsoft Outlook" under Tools & Options & Other. Submitted trouble ticket to 5dollarhosting regarding blocking of their mail servers by AOL—I can't send e-mail to Tina anymore! Sent our defective Samsung SM-348 combo drive in for service today. Did work on Lodestar: set up spreadsheet data for table importing, inserted code for bios, sent back a few questions to Patrick for review. Figured out why the cpu was maxing out at 100% at seemingly random times on one of our computers: Sophos was running a background scan, but nothing came up on the screen to let you know it was happening—it just sucked up all the cpu time. Changed the configs from "normal" to "low" priority. I changed the scheduling to scan during hours we're less likely to be using the computer. Also scheduled SMTP alerts for Sophos—never got around to doing that until now. Should be useful.