ITA Senior Capstone 2014

The finish result of my T- Shirt design for Black Student Union at East High School

First One: I purchased a few old computers with the intention of turning them into a Beowulf cluster, which is basically several computers working together to do complex equations. The first thing I did to each computer was add ram where possible, which was only possible with one of the three Desktops, and not on the laptop that I had laying around. This was because the Pentium 3 and the slower Pentium 4 computer did not contain ram that I actually owned. The faster P4 was able to be upgraded to 1.5GB. The P3 had 512MB, and the slower P4 had 256MB. I used Ubuntu Server to power all of them, as it has the lowest overhead of any of the Ubuntu Operating systems, and I am familiar with it. Here is an Imgur album of the actual hardware involved.

Here is a Youtube video of it functioning.

Second One:

My sister had an older pink Acer Aspire One netbook running Windows XP that she believed to be slow. I would have put probably Lubuntu on there, but she dislikes Linux. I decided to re-install Windows. First, I needed to figure out what the recovery menu key combination was. It was alt+f10, which I found by using Google. There weren’t any files that needed to be kept, so I was able to just completely nuke it, as I suspected viruses and other miscellaneous things that I would rather not worry about forgetting to fix. The recovery system was on a hidden partition on the hard drive, like most modern computers. I ran that, and it took a fairly short time, and finished during study hour. After it finished running, I rebooted The netbook and began the “initial” setup. During this, the computer decided to play music for some reason that probably had to do with marketing this as a “fun” computer. I don’t know for sure, but that was my best guess. At first I thought someone else was playing music. Anyways, after that was finished, I rebooted and began uninstalling the bloatware, including what I believe was DVD burning software… On a computer that has no disk drive. For one program, McAfee Security Center(?), I needed to run a specific tool to fully remove it, as McAfee doesn’t like people removing their software fully for some reason. I then went over to Ninite, and got a few select programs and codecs/runtimes that I deemed necessary to possess. The codecs were basic things that most computers connected to the internet need to fully use the web. The programs were Chrome, Skype, MBAM+MSE, spybot, libre office, 7-zip, and possibly other things that I can’t quite remember. There was an issue with Spybot and MSE appearing to not get along, which caused MSE to use a ton of the CPU’s resources. I uninstalled it to fix this issue, which appeared to work. After that, I removed some programs from the startup list, and added Adblock Plus(necessary for nerds and idiots alike) and WOT(necessary to make sure you don’t go to dangerous sites) to chrome. When that was done, I considered it about finished.