Our second day of class covered the second chapter of the book — the creation of a powerpoint presentation.

Homework:

• Chapter Two Matching
• Chapter Two Review Questions
• Project 2C
• Project 2D

DNS was the topic at hand today.  We looked at a scenario which allowed us have basically three companies with differing relationships.  We set up our DNS servers to be able to use one company’s DNS to use the Internet, and set up a forwarder to send all DNS queries for a certain domain to that domain’s DNS servers.  ‘Twas good.

Homework:

• Take Home Test 2 – download it here.

Today we covered chapters 2 and 3 — dealing with IP addresses and the routing of them.  We spent a large portion of the class going over IP subnetting and supernetting.

We then briefly talked about routing technologies.  Next week, we’ll look at the labs from these two chapters and put what we learned into action.

Homework:

• Take Home Test 2 – download it here.

Tonight’s class covered perhaps the most important part of the computer network — the data that is stored on it.  Seriously, any once piece of a network can be replaced by coughing up some cash (sometimes a lot of it) — but data hardly can — backup, backup, backup!

Anyway, what we were discussing tonight dealt more with the technology behind the hard drives that are data is stored on.  We looked at hard drives (HDDs) in general, and then explored the differences between their IDE and SCSI versions, looked at iSCSI, Fibre Channel and finally ended up the class with a nice RAID discussion.

Homework:

• Chapter 2 Review Questions

Today’s class covered the next three chapters of the 270 book: chapters 4-6.

Chapter Four dealt with hardware — mainly with hardware installation and then dealing with it once it was installed.  We spent quite a bit of time playing in Device Manager.

Chapter Five covered the user experience in Windows XP.  A large majority of the text covers tasks that most of us know well, but it also covers some that maybe we don’t know as well.  Some highlights to pay attention to while studying include configuring multiple monitors and power schemes (we didn’t go over these in class, but you are still responsible for them):

• Home/Office Desk
• Portable/Laptop
• Presentation
• Always On
• Minimal Power Management
• Max Battery

Chapter Six dealt with setting up printers and faxes.  Some examples of topics we looked at include local printers, network printers, setting up multiple printers to point to one print device and one printer pointing to multiple print devices (printer pooling).

Homework:

• Take Home Test 2 – download it here.

The highlight for my day today at work was getting a new bookcase — as you can see this one has three shelves (the old one just had two) and now I can store all of my books without stacking any on top.

… I don’t know what will.

Welcome to Powerpoint class!

Today we began our journey through Powerpoint.  Hopefully you’ll find this class useful and will pick up some skills thoughout the next several weeks.

We began by discussion the syllabus and some generalities regarding this class.  Items such as attendence and make up policies were gone over, and we also talked about how you could get out of taking the final exam (<2 absences, B or greater average) and how you could score an automatic A in the class (pass MS certification 77-603 before 9/11).

Then, we dove right into the book and I turned you guys loose to conquer its pages on your own.  Some of things you learned in this chapter nclude the difference between Slides and Outline view, how to add headers and footers to your slides, what speaker notes are and how to add them to your presentations and how to use Powerpoint’s built-in help system.

If you need a copy of the class syllabus, you can find it in the files section to your right, or you can download a copy here.

Homework:

• Chapter 1: Matching
• Chapter 1: Fill-in-the-blank
• Chapter 1: Project 1C
• Chapter 1: Project 1D

We covered chapter one today, looking at the System Development Life Cycle and its steps: Planning, Analysis, Designing, Implementing and Managing.  We then looked at some tools that come with Windows to determine if our servers would be ready to handle Server 2003 upgrades.

Homework:

• Take Home Test 01 – download it here.

Today we covered chapter one and basically worked the kinks out of our lab setups (which is to say, we worked the kinks out of our old hardware).

Homework:

• Take Home Exam 1 – download it here.