Using Computers in Lecture Theatres

Simpson Wong

What’s New?

Recently, the computing environment in the lecture theatres has undergone a series of enhancements. In addition to the previous upgrade of facilitating diskless boot-up procedures for PCs and installation of faster Pentium CPU, two major changes were taken. The hardware configurations of all the workstations are improved and booting up to Microsoft Windows 95 environment is now feasible.

Hardware-wise, each PC is now booted up with a faster Magneto Optical (MO) disk. It is further equipped with a local hard disk, a CD-ROM drive, sound card, hi-color display card and monitor, Microsoft IntelliMouse and a remote mouse to facilitate teaching. The amount of memory is upgraded to 32MB for better performance.

Along with the Windows 95 operating system, some popular Windows 95 software packages such as Office 97 and Netscape 4.03 are also made available in the lecture theatres. Under the Windows 95 environment, file transfer becomes more handy. Large data files can be easily copied from your office PC to the local hard disk once Windows 95’s file sharing feature is enabled. Packages such as SAS and SPSS, which used to require hard disk in order to operate, run like a champ now.

More About the Working Environment …

Once you boot up the workstations in the lecture theatres, you will be prompted if you would like to clean up the hard disk. In order to preserve data integrity and avoid virus infection, you are highly recommended to do so. As such, you can be guaranteed to have a fresh copy of Windows 95 downloaded to the hard disk and all the installed software packages available for use. This prevention step is simple and safeguard you from using previously downloaded Windows 95, which might have been corrupted or even virus infected.

Thereafter, you can invoke any one of the options below to connect to the designated systems:

• Windows 95 for Lecture Theatre
• Lecture Theatre Software Library
• CSC Student Software Library
• Your Departmental Software Library

The new option "Windows 95 for Lecture Theatre" provides the Windows 95 working environment and is served by a dedicated server. Here, you can access software packages such as Office 97, Netscape 4.0.3 and SAS 6.11. Windows 95 provides faster Internet communication with 64K color and high resolution display. This option is ideal for lecturers and guest speakers to do their presentation using PowerPoint. No login is required.

The "Lecture Theatre Software Library" is served by a dedicated server with faster response time. No login is required. English and Chinese Windows 3.1, Office 4.2 and Netscape 2.0.1 are available in this library. By default, the display driver is set to 64K color.

The CSC Student Software Library emulates the same operating environment as in the CSC Teaching Studios. It provides a variety of DOS and Windows applications. The start-up time of this library is the fastest among all four options. Your email account and password (staff ID number if unchanged) is required for running each software.

Selecting the "Departmental Software Library" option will connect you to the same software library of your department. If you need to access software packages available only on your departmental server, select this option. The response time might be a bit slower, depending on the performance of your departmental server and the network traffic. Your Staff LAN password is required for login.

Any Improvement?

After this upgrade, there is a significant improvement in the overall performance and usability. The statistics listed below reflects the time taken to power on the computer, connect to the designated library, select the software (PowerPoint in our case) until the software screen appears:

Your Feedback …

All users are welcome to provide suggestions for improving the computing environment in the lecture theatres. Instructions for the usage of the computers are posted on the side of the monitors. In case of doubt or any problem, please call our Help Desk at x7658.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk