Week 5 - Hardware in
Today, February 14 (Happy Valentines!), the hardware came in for the computer upgrades at Tricycle. Aernout (site Supervisor) tasked me with inspecting the parts and planning the order of updates. The new solid state drives were all good, and the factory was too busy to interrupt with taking one of their machines offline. I agreed with Mr. Hetem and Susan Hines (Factory Manager) that we would build a computer, install all of the needed software, do set up and system tests, prior to taking a factory machine offline. All of the factory machines are desktop computers. We took a desktop machine from storage and checked it to make sure that it would boot up - which it did. The machine had Windows 7 installed.
I disassembled the machine and checked memory and processor speeds. Mr. Hetem decided that the machine would perform much better with a new motherboard with a faster processor which he ordered. He also ordered 16 GB of memory for the new motherboard. I checked the status of the 3rd party graphics card, NVidia GeForce 765, and determined that it would perform well with new board as specified. I reassembled the new machine to the point where I could to make sure I did not loose any parts. The new Mother board is supposed to arrive Monday, February 17. I will continue the build then if all goes as planned and I do not have customer visits etc.
With the machine disassembled and not much else I could do with it, using an interface I removed from an old external hard drive I took the old (existing) hard disc drive and erased everything impertinent to the new build. I installed all of the software I could (I could not finalize installations without the actual assembly as some software requires the unique addresses of the finished machine to install). I also began installing the new operating system onto the new solid state drive. again, this cannot be finished until the drives are installed into a machine so that the hardware can assign machine addresses to drives and protocol addresses to the overall machine. (Machine addresses are unique sets of numbers that the computer uses to route data between programs and drives. The sets of numbers are how the computer "knows" where all of the hardware is.)
Hopefully, everything will proceed more smoothly using the "spare" computer to minimize downtime. Once all of the software has finished installing, I can then set up email and network parameters. All the user will have to do is update passwords for log in, email, and any associated network accounts. The services will take a bit of time to populate to the new machine, but with Shaw being Google All In, the population process will likely take less than a half-hour to complete.
All of the factory users have been advised to do back-ups of their machines, so once the designated user finishes logging in on their new machine, I can repeat the process until we have all of the hardware and software updated. All the users will have to do past that is to reload their back-ups.
I disassembled the machine and checked memory and processor speeds. Mr. Hetem decided that the machine would perform much better with a new motherboard with a faster processor which he ordered. He also ordered 16 GB of memory for the new motherboard. I checked the status of the 3rd party graphics card, NVidia GeForce 765, and determined that it would perform well with new board as specified. I reassembled the new machine to the point where I could to make sure I did not loose any parts. The new Mother board is supposed to arrive Monday, February 17. I will continue the build then if all goes as planned and I do not have customer visits etc.
With the machine disassembled and not much else I could do with it, using an interface I removed from an old external hard drive I took the old (existing) hard disc drive and erased everything impertinent to the new build. I installed all of the software I could (I could not finalize installations without the actual assembly as some software requires the unique addresses of the finished machine to install). I also began installing the new operating system onto the new solid state drive. again, this cannot be finished until the drives are installed into a machine so that the hardware can assign machine addresses to drives and protocol addresses to the overall machine. (Machine addresses are unique sets of numbers that the computer uses to route data between programs and drives. The sets of numbers are how the computer "knows" where all of the hardware is.)
Hopefully, everything will proceed more smoothly using the "spare" computer to minimize downtime. Once all of the software has finished installing, I can then set up email and network parameters. All the user will have to do is update passwords for log in, email, and any associated network accounts. The services will take a bit of time to populate to the new machine, but with Shaw being Google All In, the population process will likely take less than a half-hour to complete.
All of the factory users have been advised to do back-ups of their machines, so once the designated user finishes logging in on their new machine, I can repeat the process until we have all of the hardware and software updated. All the users will have to do past that is to reload their back-ups.
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