Although the long lines are gone from the Duke Ellington Ballroom, frustration still lingers over NIU’s new class registration process.

The first full-scale use of Touchtone Registration Add/Drop Class Schedule (TRACS) has not gone without its problems.

However, the problems were not unexpected. Richard Durfee, director of Registration and Records, said he felt there would be a few bugs in the system.

There was some trouble last Friday when NIU’s mainframe gave TRACS some problems due to its old software, but the problem was taken care of by the end of the night, Durfee said.

Monday brought forth a problem with the actual TRACS software. The software is the component which answers the phones, he explained.

“There was an overload of phone calls which caused many people to get hung-up on,” Durfee said.

“The problem received top priority, but it takes a lot of time to fix everything,” he said.

The problems didn’t stop there. Tuesday’s short but powerful rainstorm knocked out power to some of NIU’s buildings and computers.

“NIU’s mainframe went down,” he said. “All but one piece of equipment in the mainframe was fixed.”

“The one remaining piece was a box which connected 64 of NIU’s telephone lines to the mainframe. Until it was fixed, TRACS remained down,” he said.

“It is a new system with new equipment, but you can’t test every piece. We’re learning as we work with it,” he said.

Durfee said NIU purchased the software from Perception Technology, a Massachusetts-based company. He said the company gave the problems top priority.

“NIU is a very customized application. It is not canned off like other systems,” said Wade Ogden, an engineer with Perception. “When we have problems with our software, we treat every site like a customized situation,” he added.

Ogden said the problem with the hang-ups results from the software. “The problem does not happen consistently, so it will be very hard to spot,” he said.

Ogden also said his people were up until 8 a.m. Tuesday morning trying to fix the problem.

Durfee said most of the problems have resulted from excessive amounts of phone calls.

“The system can handle up to 60 calls an hour. At one point, we had over 20,000 calls in one hour,” Durfee said.

As of Monday, over 101,000 calls have been placed to the system, with over 60,000 calls resulting in some type of transaction, he said.

The remaining 41,000 calls consisted mostly of callbacks, he added.

Durfee’s advice to students having problems with the system is to call between 5 and 10 p.m. when the system is not so overloaded.

“On the positive side of things, TRACS has served a lot of students very well with no problems,” he said.