Improvements in the Student Terminal Area

 

The following items highlight the key changes in the student environment.

1. Printing Facilities
   • Laser

     Six more HP laser printers have been put into service, making up a total of 16 laser printers for general use. To accommodate these laser printers, Room Homan has been restructured to contribute a larger printing area. Although facilities have been increased, printing charge has been reduced to 30 cents per printed page.

   • Dot Matrix

     To provide better working environment, all the old 9-pin printers were replaced with high speed, high quality and low noise 24-pin dot matrix printers.

2. Hard Disks

   To provide a fast and temporary storage area for students to work inside the CSC student terminal area, the CSC is going to install local hard disks (each of size 540 MB) to all PCs. Hopefully, this exercise will be completed before October.

3. Software Licences for File Compression and Protection

   In line with the hard disk installation exercise, the CSC has also acquired software licences for compressing/decompressing files so that students can easily backup and transfer their files. Since hard disks accelerate virus spread, virus scanning software are already installed to perform preventive check. Students are strongly recommended to scan their working disks and the local hard disks as frequently as possible to reduce the risk of virus infection.

   The CSC also adds a system utility to clean up the local hard disks when students boot up the machines. Students will be prompted whether they want the hard disks to be cleaned. If so, the PCs automatically do that. Otherwise, they will be left intact and students have to take their own responsibilities to protect their files.

4. Scanning Service

   In addition to the existing text/image scanner, another scanner has been installed for general use. With the local hard disks, students can now capture high quality images for their course work.

5. Pentium PCs

   Around two hundred PCs have been upgraded with high performance Pentium processors in the Seminar Rooms, open access areas, and the Project Lab. These machines greatly improve the teaching and studying environment.

6. SPARCstations

   Powerful Sun SPARCstation 4 machines have replaced existing Classics and LX machines in both Seminar Rooms I and J. These new workstations, equipped with the microSPARC-II processor and 32 MB of memory, have substantially improved the UNIX working environment.

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