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Please Join Us For Our Fall Genius Bar

Post author By
Post date November 21, 2014

Drexel TechServ is excited to announce that we will be hosting our next Community Genius Bar on Saturday, November 22nd, 2014, 10AM-1:30PM!

The location for this Genius Bar will be:
The Dornsife Center

3509 Spring Garden Street

Philadelphia, PA 19104

The event will take place in the School Building (Ryan Hall) S108 and street parking will be available.

We are looking forward to helping you with any and all of your technological needs, but here are some reminders to help us “Serv” you better.

If you are bringing a laptop or tablet computer, please bring your power adapter as well.
If you are bringing a desktop, please bring just the desktop. We’ll have power cords and monitors with us. However, if your issue is with your monitor, do bring it along and we’ll take a look at it.
Sometimes, there are issues that are too complex to fix on the spot. We also cannot guarantee a fix we make will be permanent nor that it is the best fix possible, but we’ll always try our best. If your device is in still under warranty, we recommend contacting your manufacturer’s support instead, but we’ll still be happy to take a look.
If your repair is something that requires an expensive and unique replacement part, the most common example being “the screen on my device is smashed”, we will likely NOT BE ABLE TO HELP. This is because
- 1) it requires a complete screen replacement – these parts are expensive and unique to manufacturers (i.e. we would have to have replacement screens for every make and model device possible, which is not feasible. Think how certain cars parts can’t be swapped between cars!)
- 2) screen replacement often takes several hours to complete – spanning longer than the duration of the event.
In contrast to the above point, software based repairs or repairs that use non-manufacturer-specific hardware are perfect for these types of events. (Think ‘car oil change’ type work!)

We hope to see you there!

Join Us Tomorrow For Going National

Post author By
Post date November 19, 2014

Howdy folks!

We will not be having a meeting tomorrow (20 Nov 2014) as we are having an event for Computer Science Education Week instead.

Please join us at 7:30pm on the 2nd floor of Ross Commons (34th and Powelton) for a screening of “Going National,” a documentary of the arrival of the microcomputer (primarily the Macintosh) at Drexel in the 1980’s. This event is free and open to the public. We will have popcorn for you to enjoy as well as classic Macintosh systems to try (please don’t mix the two together.)

This event is a part of Computer Science Education Week at Drexel and was made possible with the support of the College of Computing and Informatics and the Drexel University Archives.

Please RSVP if you plan to attend.

Announcements

Please pardon the downtime

Post author By
Post date October 21, 2014

If you are one of our WebServ (website and file hosting service) clients, you may have experienced some downtime with your sites recently, most recently being this morning. We are aware of this issue and have identified a failing hard drive on our server. We are currently working to resolve it. However, until we do, you may experience more downtime on your sites. We do have monitoring in place that lets us know when our server goes down, and we work to bring it back online as soon as we become aware of an issue.

Our apologies for the inconvenience and our thanks for your understanding.

~ Stephen Weber, VP & Head of Special Projects

Weekly Meetings

Welcome [Back] To TechServ!

Post author By
Post date September 21, 2014

Greetings!

Stephen here, your Vice President of TechServ. For those of you new to Drexel and/or TechServ, welcome! To our returning members, welcome back. In case you haven’t heard of us or bumped in to us on campus yet, allow me to introduce ourselves.

TechServ is a student organization here at Drexel and our mission is to help bridge the digital divide in Philadelphia (and in a couple cases, beyond!) We work to achieve this mission by holding events on campus at Drexel as well as the Philadelphia area. In addition, we also donate computers to nonprofits in Philadelphia that we have refurbished.

Membership is open to everyone at Drexel and you don’t need any technical background to join. If you join us, we’ll show and teach you everything you need to know. In previous years, we offered what was known as UNIV-101 hours. Permitting I’m keeping up with my Drexel news correctly, I believe UNIV-101 is a bit different this year and community service hours are no longer a requirement. Historically, many of our long-term members served with us before becoming long-term members. The changes this year means we’ll be changing a bit too.

As our long-term members already know very well, our workshop is, shall we say, “cozy.” We’re in the basement of MacAlister Hall in room 0020 and space for us comes at a premium with all the computers we have lined up for refurbishment and donation. As a result, we would cap UNIV-101 attendance at four students per meeting. As we don’t have UNIV-101 students this year, we do not have attendance caps on meetings.

However, because we are very limited on space, if you are a new student or simply new to TechServ, please let us know if you’re coming to a meeting so we can get a headcount. Our meetings this term are Tuesdays and Thursdays 6 – 8 pm. If you can make it, great! We look forward to seeing you! Please let us know when you’ll be coming by RSVPing through TicketLeap. If you don’t see the date you plan on coming, don’t panic. We’ll be adding more dates soon. Meetings start this week, which means our first meeting of the year is 23 September, this Tuesday.

We look forward to meeting you!

Events

Community Genius Bar – Saturday, August 16, 2014

Post author By admin
Post date July 24, 2014

TechServ is pleased to announce we will be holding another one of our free Community Genius Bars on August 16th from 9:00am until 3:00pm at HELP Philadelphia. If you have a computer that is having technical difficulties, bring it in and we’ll check it out.

HELP Philadelphia is located at:
6250 Eastwick Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19142

Sometimes, there are issues that are too complex to fix on the spot. We also cannot guarantee a fix we make will be permanent nor that it is the best fix possible, but we’ll always try our best. If your device is in still under warranty, we recommend contacting your manufacturer’s support instead, but we’ll still be happy to take a look.

Some helpful things for both you and us:

If your repair is something that requires an expensive and unique replacement part, the most common example being “the screen on my device is smashed”, we will likely NOT BE ABLE TO HELP. This is because
- 1) it requires a complete screen replacement – these parts are expensive and unique to manufacturers (i.e. we would have to have replacement screens for every make and model device possible, which is not feasible. Think how certain cars parts can’t be swapped between cars!)
- 2) screen replacement often takes several hours to complete – spanning longer than the duration of the event.
In contrast to the above point, software based repairs or repairs that use non-manufacturer-specific hardware are perfect for these types of events. (Think ‘car oil change’ type work!)
If bringing a laptop or tablet computer, please bring your power adapter as well.
If bringing a desktop, please bring just the desktop. We’ll have power cords and monitors with us. However, if your issue is with your monitor, do bring it along and we’ll take a look at it.

For additional information or questions please email techserv@drexel.edu.