Personal computers are being fixed, often free of charge, by the nine members of Students Correcting Open-door PC Emergencies (SCOPE) at Sinclair Community College.
The SCOPE office is located in Building 5 Room 114.
“It is totally free to the student unless they need to buy some sort of hardware,” said David Sacksterder, SCOPE team leader for fall quarter. “My biggest concern is just letting the students know this is available to them.”
“We are there for students, faculty and staff,” Sacksterder said. “They can bring us any computer [PC or Mac] and we will do the labor on it for free.”
The team is waiting to finish working on a computer that was diagnosed with having a broken hard drive. Once the student purchases a new hard drive, SCOPE will finish the repair, according to Sackstreder.
SCOPE exists as a capstone course for computer information systems (CIS) majors. The program was introduced in Winter Quarter of 2011 as a way to give Sinclair student’s hands-on experience to augment their classroom learning.
“A lot of the book work doesn’t transfer over to the real world,” said Professor Ken Hook, faculty adviser for SCOPE. “I try to bring all that together for the students.”
Sacksterder said that they can only do so much over the phone and the best thing to do is to bring your system down to the SCOPE room to be diagnosed.
“We’ll fix any problem,” said Sackstreder. “If we can’t fix it, we’ll be honest with you.”
SCOPE members are equipped to tackle both software and hardware issues, though software problems are the majority of what they see, with viruses being the most common issue, according to Sackstreder.
“There is no way to be 100 percent safe,” Sackstreder said. No matter what, you can still get viruses; that’s just the way it is.”
Sacksterder said making sure your anti-virus software is up to date and running and that your operating system is up to date, can help reduce the chance of catching a virus.
Turn-around times can be minutes or days, according to Sacstreder. For virus scanning, the initial scan, assessing the problem, can be the biggest time consumer.
“When you do these scans, it scans every file that is on your system,” Sacksterder said. A new system might have relatively few files, but a system that has been used a while can have many times this number, according to Sackstreder.
On the other hand, some jobs are quick.
“We fixed four computers this morning in five minutes [each],” Hook said, who estimates that the labor alone would have cost the students more than $200. “We save the students money.”
Last quarter the team fixed 211 computers, which was an increase from the eight that were fixed during Winter Quarter 2011, according to Sackstreder. The team hopes to fix even more Fall Quarter 2011.
“It is excellent for both the student leaving for the work force [the SCOPE volunteer], and students that get their computers worked on,” Sacksterder said.
He also wants the student body to know that although they prefer CIS students, there is room for those who have an interest in computers to get involved.
“We also take volunteers, if you want to get some experience, we’ll actually take as many volunteers as we can get,” Sackstreder said.