SeniorNet Nelson is fortunate in that our President, Lindsay Hunter, is also a technical wizard, along with our Life Member and maintenance manager Graeme Valpy.

Having established that there was interest from some members in gaining more knowledge of the inner working of computers, a Technical Interest Group (TIG) has been formed. Meetings are held monthly.  Since the inaugural meeting in February 2011 numbers have steadily increased.

Meetings are held on the fourth Wednesday of the month, in the SeniorNet Hall at 2.30 pm.  

Click here to read the Report of meeting November 2011

Pleasecome and join us - visitors are most welcome.

Topics covered so far have included:
how to change or add a hard drive,
replacing the CMOS battery,
what the BIOS does and
how to make changes to settings,
along with general tips for investigating computer hardware problems.

Members are encouraged to lead discussion on any problem they have encountered, so that jointly we can find a solution.

Using old donated computers we plan to learn how to reformat a hard drive and install the open source Linux operating system. The expected spin-off from the group is to have a core of knowledgeable members able to assist with ongoing maintenance of our Learning Centre computers.
The future looks bright. 

We now have a team of SeniorNet people who perform remote maintenance on all the Pcs, in all their operating systems.

The PCs are left running at the Learning Centre and the maintenance person on duty logs on, from home, to each computer in turn using Team Viewer.

Scanning is then carried out and updates of software are completed according to the scheduled requirements.  Team Viewer is a free download and many SeniorNet members are finding it useful to safely help each other with technical problems, without ever leaving home. Read more about Team Viewer: 

http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/index.aspx