Monday, November 16, 1998
Tiffin Police Dept. to upgrade computers for year 2000
By Jefferson Wolfe
Staff Writer
The Tiffin Police Department is to spend a $14,000 grant to upgrade its computers and become year-2000 compliant.
Tiffin Police Chief Tom Steyer said the department received notification about the 1998 Local Law Enforcement Block Grant last week. The actual total will be $14,063.
The grant comes from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance.
While the funds can be used for essentially anything to reduce crime and improve public safety, Steyer said the computer upgrades are needed most.
''All our computers but two need to be upgraded to pentium chips with hard drives,'' said Ofc. Fred Stevens. He said the year-2000 upgrade will be part of the process.
The upgrades will cost about $700 a computer, and will use more than $13,000, he said.
All of the department's 21 computers are four years old, and about half of them stay on 24 hours a day, Stevens said. Because of improvements in technology, the department's old computers are much slower than more current models with pentium chips.
There is a software package that can be used, in some cases, to make the computers year-2000 compliant, but not all the computers could use it, Stevens said.
''We decided to upgrade them all instead of mix and match,'' Stevens said.
Some of the computers are ''dumb terminals,'' meaning they connect to the overall system, but do not have any memory of their own. The upgrade will give all the computers new pentium processors and hard drives, Stevens said. As a result, they will be faster and have more memory for storing and running programs, he said.
The upgrade also will allow the department to have access to newer programs that require more speed and more memory, Stevens said.
All the work is being done by Heritage Computer, 237 N. Washington St., he said.