Users of 3,000 computers in the Lawrence school district are getting a reprieve from crashes that have plagued the network since August, officials said Tuesday.

Software and hardware upgrades in August triggered an avalanche of outages that interrupted computer access to teacher classrooms and student laboratories.

The latest intervention by district technicians and consultants at Novell in Provo, Utah, has stabilized the network, said Mike Eltschinger, the school district’s supervisor of instructional computing.

“I think we’re going to take a very conservative stance as to where we go from here,” Eltschinger said. “Before we do any changes, we want to make sure we can test those out before we implement them across the district.”

Until now, patches introduced to correct flaws in the network actually triggered new problems.

Eltschinger said none of the district’s 9,700 students and 900 teachers avoided fallout from crashes.

“When things were down, they were down for everybody,” he said. “It had major implications.”

The district has spent several years consolidating its computer server system at district headquarters, 110 McDonald Drive. In the past, each school had its own server.

Eltschinger said the move to a centralized network led to greater operating efficiency, allowed technicians to remotely service computers and improved school-to-school computer access for employees and students.

“The disadvantage to that is that if anything happens to those servers, if affects the whole district,” he said.

Attempts to upgrade a network to improve services pose a hazard.

“The more components we put in, the more complex it gets, the more points of failure there can be,” Eltschinger said.

He said the district’s system typically experienced a few problems at the start of a school year.

This year, he said, problems were more complex. A key factor was that the district switched to new servers with dual processors. Updated Novell software didn’t properly support the dual system, he said.

“It’s frustrating for us not to sometimes be able to resolve the issues,” he said. “With technology, there are no 100 percent guarantees.”