Upgrade of Student Machines in Student Terminal Area

 

Joe Chow

This summer, there have been two major upgrade exercises in the Student Terminal Area of the Computing Services Centre: the PC upgrade and the SunSparc workstation upgrade. Both hardware and software are involved in the PC upgrade. The original CPUs ranging from Pentium 90 MHz to 166 MHz, which were in use for more than two years, have been replaced by Pentium II running at 333 MHz. The memory on each PC has been increased fourfold from 16 MB to 64 MB and each of the 500 MB hard disk has been changed to the faster 4.2 GB hard disk. With the installation of the “reborn cards”, users are no longer required to use any boot disk in the Student Terminal Area and can choose to boot up the PC to each of the different operating systems as desired. At the moment, when you switch on a PC, a new menu will be displayed as shown below: Users can select the required environment using the <UP>/<DOWN> arrow keys and confirm the selection with the <ENTER> key. A brief description of the keys to be used and their functions can be found below the menu. For the SunSparc workstation upgrade, UltraSparc 5 workstations with more memory and processing power have been in place for the Sparc 4. As there is a great demand on PCs for teaching purposes, the nature of the teaching studio Izar has been changed to cope with the needs. It is now equipped with new PCs instead of SunSparc workstations running the Unix operating system. The upgraded workstations have been moved to Room Jupiter as well as other areas to facilitate more student access to these workstations inside the Student Terminal Area.

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