An Arizona school district information technology administrator is being investigated for misuse of campus computers because he installed and ran SETI software on up to 5,000 machines. The school district contends that this cost between “$1.2 and 1.6 million dollars over a 9 year period.” As I would have expected, quite a few people are giving that figure a wide-eyed look. SETI, a research project sponsored by some pretty big names (Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Fujitsu, to name a few), is intended to let ordinary computers search for extra-terrestrial life using already-existing idle time on computers all over the world. The tiny-footprinted program runs in the background on your PC and for the most part is unnoticeable, and rarely causes difficulty.

What strikes me odd about the story is not only that horrendously over-inflated “cost of operating” figure they are using to charge the man, but how the media is picking up on the SETI aspect of the story, without really telling the whole story. The IT Administrator, who has since resigned amid the probe, was warned several years ago about job performance that had nothing to do with SETI. And he was terminated (or resigned, depending on who you are talking to) for theft of equipment from campuses, abuse of purchasing oversight, not training his staff effectively, and downloading pornography. The use of SETI on campus equipment is a minor footnote compared to everything else that is coming out about this administrator and his activities on the campus.

But isn’t it much more fun for the media to sensationalize the somewhat marginal belief in UFO’s? The fact that he downloaded pornography, had no firewalls on the campus system, and spent the district’s money on unapproved hardware and software, is somehow not as prurient as his penchant for UFO hunting. I also find it ludicrous that the school district is claiming that over a million dollars was spent running SETI, rather than focusing on the real possibility that student and staff’s personal information was likely accessed because of the lack of security employed on the campus’s network by the administrator.

I’m not saying the guy didn’t show a distinct lack of judgment, I’m just not sure the SETI angle is all that important. It looks like they have much more to charge him with than that.

A couple of days ago, a friend of my son’s called me with panic in her voice. Her fancy media-enabled Acer laptop had died. Kept booting into a recovery mode but then could not recover, so would shut down, only to do it all over again. I asked her if there were any CD’s or DVD’s that came with the computer, which is only about six months old.

“No, but there’s a booklet.”

I had her drop the laptop and booklet off at the house yesterday and last night I started it up to see what I could do. I could get to a dos prompt and was able to do some disk checking, enough to find out it didn’t seem to be a hardware issue. But beyond that, with the Windows recovery not functioning, and no CD or DVD installation disks, I was pretty much dead in the water to do anything else. I looked through the little manual that was shipped with the laptop. It has a section on safety (“never use your laptop in the rain or bathtub”), and a section on how to properly plug it in, plus sections on how to use the fancy media functions on the face of the laptop. But nothing about troubleshooting or recovery, other than a phone number for Acer and a website where I could buy (and have shipped to me in 2 weeks) a recovery CD.

Google is my friend, so I started plugging in keywords and phrases hoping to come up with something I could use to restore this machine. Forty-five minutes later, I had nothing but torrent sites and the same information: “reinstall from disk” or “use your backup recovery CD’s you made.” I also saw in multiple places that people who had made backup/recovery CD’s had coasters instead of working software once they got done, and this didn’t build much confidence – even if I had the recovery disks that should have been made when the machine was first used, it didn’t sound like they would have worked anyway. I had a Vista disk, but it wasn’t the right one (the laptop needed Vista Home Premium and all I have are Home Basic and Ultimate), and I was still hoping for a recovery rather than a complete start-from-scratch do-over. Plus, I wanted whatever proprietary software and drivers needed for the Acer, not just generic ones from the CD/DVD’s that I had on hand. What to do.

I changed search terms slightly and finally got a hit that was worth something. cnet to the rescue! Finally, I found instructions for accessing Acer’s recovery console on the sick laptop. All it took was a reboot, the alt key, and tapping the F10 key about 80 times, but I got into the console, and did a repair from there. Worked like a charm, and the laptop was back up and running in just under thirty minutes. Of course, that was after spending an hour searching for an answer. Had there just been the original CD/DVD’s in the box with the laptop to begin with, I would not have had to waste so much time.

How much money does it really save to print the CD and put it in the box? Really, is this an insurmountable issue? Makes me wonder if laptop makers (and desktop makers too, for that matter) are just more interested in selling you new hardware than allowing you to repair the ones you already have. After all, if my son’s friend had not had access to a geek-mom like me, she’d have probably just ended up buying another laptop. She was sure the machine was dead and unrecoverable.

Before I gave it back to her, I did go through the process of making Acer-specific recovery DVD’s. I don’t know how good they will be if/when I need them for another restore. My confidence in the Acer brand is not strong.

I have another laptop sitting at home waiting for me to repair it. This one is a Dell 1525, and it came with its CD/DVD’s. And its issue is hardware (has a bad hard drive), rather than software. I don’t anticipate any problems with restoration because I have the actual media that belongs to the laptop to begin with. That right there is a whole load off my mind.