PC Workshop Report from Mt. Gilead
Posted on March 24, 2009
We hosted a PC Workshop at Mt. Gilead over the weekend. We borrowed this idea from Jim Walton and he’s posted on it several times here in the past. This time we changed the name to “PC Clinic” and I think that helped people realize that we were going to diagnose and attempt to help with computer problems rather than teach them about computers. We offered this service primarily to our church attendees, but stressed the fact that this was a ministry available to anyone and encouraged people to tell their friends.
We started publicizing the event a couple of weeks prior to the actual event with bulletin listings. On the Sunday before the Workshop, we provided some handouts to our Sunday School classes and emphasized that this was an opportunity to have their local tech team try to give them some help before they went to a repair shop. The response this time around was much better, probably due in part to word of mouth from the prior events and because we emphasized what we wanted to offer.
Saturday we began to set up our laptops in case we needed to download something and while doing this, the first “customers” arrived. We had four computers show up needing some help within the first 10-15 minutes. I’m very grateful to my co-worker Jay for stepping up and taking care of both chatting with people and setting up some of our PCs so we could work quickly. We had several sick PCs that were sadly beyond our abilities to fix due to bad hardware, but we were not limited by that. In the course of the day, I got to re-visit my Linux knowledge to pull files off of a hard drive, scan several machines for spyware, diagnose memory and hard drive issues, fix startup problems, install new software, set up new hardware, and generally had a good time doing it. While I’m disappointed that some of the problems could not be solved due to hardware issues, I’m grateful for the opportunity to serve and help in even a limited fashion.
We ran a little over our initial schedule of 10am to 2pm, but part of that is due to the fact that we had more people to help than we’d anticipated. Some problems took a while to diagnose and recovering files from a hard drive can definitely be a lengthy process. We’re still learning about the various things that work and don’t work for our church and I look forward to the next workshop.
What went well:
- More personalized announcements of the event the week before
- Renaming the event to a “PC Clinic”
- Start Time of 10am on a Saturday
- Relatively quick check-in process for people and their computers
- Having a helper for both people and PC relations (thanks Jay!)
What we could improve:
- Preparing our work space ahead of time – we were still clearing
- Clearing out the unused and non-working machines in the workroom, even if just to recycle or get rid of them
- A larger push on publicity amongst our membership – better communication about what’s involved, perhaps even “coupons” of some sort to invite friends
- A USB Cable that we can use to plug hard drives directly into working machines – I keep forgetting to bring mine along for some reason
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If you’re interested in doing this at your own church, I’d recommend starting by perusing some of the previous posts here on PC Workshops. Jim very graciously shared just about all of his documents to get started some time ago. He also put together a list of utilities he used. For people to use as a reference, there’s a handy take-home sheet as well. I’d add Malwarebytes.org to the list of spyware removers. (Just be aware that sometimes you need to rename the installer AND the actual executable to get past the malware on the PC. I had several programs block the “known” names of both to try to prevent removal.)
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