Monday, March 26, 2007

What Would You Do? (Broken A: Drive)

Here is the current installment of What Would You Do?. The first installment garnered two responses. Let's see if we can get a larger response this go around. This is a good one. One that will force you to use your Sherlock Holmes skills.

This situation occurred yesterday when I was working my Sunday Service. A student had typed a lengthy report on one of our computers. She needed to upload the report to her school's website.

Much like sending an attachment, in order to upload the report, the document has to be saved somewhere (My Documents, Floppy Disk, Flash Drive, etc.). (See this past post for more information on saving/uploading documents).

However, customers cannot save documents to our computers due to security settings. And this particular computer's A:Drive was busted. And we did not have a flash drive.

How would we upload this document? Or, how would we move this document to another computer with a working A:Drive?

2 comments:

Miss Mary said...

I might try highlighting and copying the whole document and then opening her email account and pasting the report into the text of a message to herself. Then I would shift her to another computer with an operational A drive (or a ref desk computer if no others are available,) have her open the email, retrieve the document (copy or cut) and paste it back into a word document. Depending on how long this took, I might even consider comping the print, since none of the hassle was her fault. [Having jump drives to keep handy at the desk would be pretty sweet, Techtrainer!]

Anonymous said...

On our public computers, we are able to save files temporarily to the My Documents folder. We know it will disappear when the computer is restarted, but we use it so that we can send attachments. We also encourage customers, in this case, to restart their computers when finished. However, the My Documents folder is a little tricky to find when going to attach it through their e-mail (after clicking the "Browse" button). I believe it is under C/Documents and Settings/Public/My Documents.

Possibly, they might want to copy the text into an e-mail message, again, using their free e-mail account. Sign out of their e-mail account on the first computer, then sign into their e-mail account on a second computer with a working floppy drive.

You also gave us a website (YouSendIt) for sending an attachment without an e-mail address. I remembered this recently and looked it up on the Computer Help blog. The customer was thrilled!

I'm looking forward to your answer on the blog!
Thanks:)
Laura