Laptop Program To-Do

Finish refurb receiving cubby unit

Set-up per-station load-out

Each workstation should have it's own complement of tools, implements, and supplies. For example, each intake station should have a cup of pens, pencils, and at least one sharpie marker. Each refurb station should have a pen cup like that and a set of jeweler's drivers. And so on.

Divide adjacent workstations

Anywhere two workstations might bleed one into the other, put in some kind of clear divider. Ideal would be low physical barriers made of scrap plywood and painted prettily, but even colored tape would help.

Add external monitor testing capability

So that refurbishers can text the external VGA port on their subject laptops. this could be as simple as adding a KVM switch with only the V hooked up between the refurb Google station and its monitor.

Process box of bags of parts of who knows what

There is a clear plastic drawer full of large bags full of the parts of various laptops and paperwork that may or may not describe a laptop we still have in the Repairs in Progress area. Either re-unite these parts with their 'puters, or separate and mark them appropriately ("pulled from make, model, model #"), and sort them into parts storage

Procure and set-up testing platforms

We need two laptops... one older and equipped with PC-133 SDRAM slots and a (P)ATA hard drive connector, and one newer and equipped with (ideally) DDR3 RAM and a SATA hard drive bus. Set these to boot to both internal and external VGA, remove the lids and keyboards. Flip them over and remove the drive and RAM covers. Hook them up to the testing station KVM, and voila! testing station!

Taller tools storage shelving

Improve the Repair tool storage situation by finding a taller, more capacious shelving arrangement between Repair stations 1 & 2

Develop testing, sorting, and disposal regimes

This needs to be done with a hanful of parts types that seem to accumulate pretty severly, like batteries, older optical drives, AC adaptors, LCD screens, etc. We can't keep accumulating these parts, especially not the dead ones. some way of testing and disposing is necessary.

Add process and space labels to the floorplan

The SVG file of the laptop workshop floorplan is located at  http://code.freegeekchicago.org/assets/raw/d658b9641a35/docs/laptops/laptopsFloorPlan.svg . Currently, this document shows the current layout of the tables and shelvings, etc., overlaid with areas of color to indicate the different work stations in the workshop. Additionally, the SVG should have (a) arrows showing the process flows from one station to another and (b) text labels outside the drawing area to denote the areas by function.

Laptop Self-Study Guides

So You Wanna Work On Laptops has a set of questions that are intended to give potential laptop volunteers a clear-eyed idea of where they stand in relationship to "knowing what's up" with laptop PCs. However, these are difficult questions and we owe it too our volunteers to point them in the direction of learning. I've compiled some of these resources, linked to from the questions, but more and better resources could be added. Videos should definitely be included (not my strong suit). And some of those questions might actually require original research to answer.

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