IS 480 Journal & Progress Report

This is my final blog post for the BAS-IS program—I'm about to graduate!  This week, I worked 40 hours, bringing my quarter total to 400 hours. I spent most of the week wiping down and resetting as many senior laptops as I could to ensure we have some clean, updated systems ready for next year. While this isn’t our top priority, staff laptops weren’t yet available, and no broken student devices had been turned in yet. Starting next week, I’ll begin collecting all student and staff devices. Once they’re collected, we’ll need to find space to store them, most of them will likely sit untouched over the summer. All I can say is next year is going to be a bit of a mess, especially with so many moving parts and deferred maintenance. I also repurposed four desktop computers that were originally used only for a four-week summer school program each year. For most of their lives, they just sat in boxes. I re-imaged them, updated them to Windows 11, applied all firmware and driver updates, an...

This week, I worked 36 hours and used 4 hours of personal leave to complete my new hire onboarding at the casino. This brings my quarter total to 360 hours. On Tuesday, we had our tech meeting and created a plan for wrapping up the school year. One of our main goals is to collect all staff laptops, perform a factory reset, and upgrade them to Windows 11. This will give us a clean baseline for next school year and hopefully help reduce issues—especially since some systems are still running Windows 10 21H1 from 2021. A major challenge we’re facing is that many staff devices across the district are old and technically don’t meet Windows 11 system requirements. Some of these models include Surface Pro 4s, Surface Laptop 2s and 3s, and older Dell desktops. For the Dell desktops, I discovered a workaround. Even though both Microsoft and Dell list the CPUs as unsupported, I was able to use Dell’s recovery image tool with the device’s service tag. After clicking "Advanced," it gave m...