PC install

This morning I went down to a client's office in Wynnewood to install two PCs he picked up during the week. This is the same client I visited last Monday.

The PCs are HP Pavilions running XP Home. Yeah, they're consumer-grade but he's had very good luck with Pavillions in his small office for several years. The new boxes have P4/3GHz CPUs, 512 MB of RAM, a DVD+RW and CD-ROM drives, and 200 GB hard disks. He got them for about $800 each.

After he physically installed them, I got them on the LAN, removed a lot of the crap HP loads on the hard disks, and installed stuff like MS Office, antispyware apps, and created limited user accounts for the two girls working for him.

I also setup a Maxtor One-Touch 200 GB USB hard drive on one of his existing PCs. It's going to be used for offsite backups of the data on his e-Smith 5.5 Linux fileserver. For backup software we're using SyncBack, a nifty, free program I found last year and which I have running every night at another client.

A couple of the PCs needed updated to their antivirus software as well as Windows, so after taking care of that I automated much of that with the AVG and Windows Update schedulers.

While we worked, I mentioned to my client -- who's company does commerical property management -- that along with a partner I do network cabling. So he may be able to use us for jobs on sites he's renovating. A few cabling jobs each year the size of the one we did last Fall would be a nice supplement.