Meeting Notes

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Category:Laptop_Eval

11/19/11

How to train the builders.

• Recruiting from within laptop eval.
• At least 4:1 ratio of assistants to volunteers.
• Draw people from existing programs, "Soft Recruiting", to use in Laptop-Eval.
• How to triage stuff to raw hardware beginners.
  • Make them very aware of the requirements of the job.
    • Jewelers Touch
    • Appropriate use of force in disassembly
    • Patience
    • Troubleshooting Skills
    • Self-guided help seeking
• How to "pass" them through different areas and evaluate their skills.
  • Teach the basics to a newbie? i.e. Hardware eval?

How to run the program?

• Task management will be important
• What is the basic flow of one session?
• Find a way to organize the intake, and having a criteria to develop a pool of work, Triaging the intake.

Need to reshape the room, storage is at capacity, production is not quick enough to keep up with intake.

• Move the back wall of the storage room back into the build area.
• We need more work space
  • Add a bench to the side wall. Have Eval use the wall bench and Build the center bench.
  • Tear down wall separating Laptops and Desktops. Would require a reshape of the whole space.
    • Requires more management of space and activity to reduce mix ups. More people = greater chance of problem.
• Long Term Goal : Increase capacity of volunteers in this area to have concurrent eval and build shifts.

Space Related Problems :

• Switch Location makes cabling difficult.
  • Move tables to the back wall, move switch above it and run down the wall.
• Unused Furniture
  • Desk in back - whats it for?
  • Back shelves in corner are under-utilized.

10/29/11 :

• Look for documentation on how to find a hard drive. Big goal is to remove the HD and scrub the data.
• Locate archetypes of Laptops, and determine kinds of disassembly that each one requires (HD, screen, RAM, keyboard etc.)
• HD Complexity (higher=harder). Need to find a way to bring that across to the builders (have them pre-sort). Diagrams could also work.

1. Screw covers on bottom
2. Side loaded HD's
3. Under keyboard
4. Chasis split.

• Use MacLands labeling for tools. (toolkits, etc).
• Locate different websites for disassembly for laptops. Provide examples and links to begin our resource list. Please list them Existing Laptop Documentation.
• Develop curriculum for Laptop Hardware ID.
• Determine transition from Laptop Eval to Laptop Build (i.e. finding drivers, troubleshooting, etc).

1. Require a Command line Class?
2. Require some other kind of class.
3. Require students to do QA.
   1. Provides a higher level overview and basic understanding.
4. Throw them example boxes, i.e. unplug something, or break a driver.
   1. Make it an intro to the troubleshooting.

• Determine a Triage process to sort machines.

1. Determine Laptop Ratings for Red, Yellow, Green etc.
   1. Store Boxes
      1. Low - P4's, Athelon 64, Celeron M, Celeron, Sempron. 512MB RAM. 30-80gb HDD.
      2. Mid - Turion 64, Pentium M, Core Solo. 1GB RAM. 60-80gb HDD
      3. High - Dual Core or better. 2+GB RAM. 80+gb HDD.
      4. As-Is - Pentium 3, or Crappy. <512GB RAM. No HDD.

• How to find specs?

1. Find specs using MemTest.

• How do we recruit people into this new program?

1. Schedule them into specific Saturday slots.
2. Use fliers and emails.
3. Reach out to tech colleges (use existing networks and contacts).

• Begin the program using the large supple of Vesta HP laptops (6200, 6000, 4200, 4400 etc).