In
the 33rd issue of the Network Computing, we have reported
the installation of new Windows XP operating system on PCs
of the Lecture Theatres (LT) and classrooms. Now, let's talk
about the problems that have been reported since its installation.
User
Login
In order to increase the network
security level of all public accessible PCs, all users including
those in the LT and classrooms are required to login before
they can access the campus network and Internet. Unlike the
previous Windows 98 environment that did not require any login,
this inevitably causes users some inconvenience and they may
take some time to get used to it. To minimize this hassle,
a second boot option with no user login is available for those
lecturers who do not require any network access and downloading
of software during their lectures. If they really need certain
data for lectures, they can simply store it on any one of
the media supported by the local storage devices (CD, Zip
disk, floppy, USB memory stick, etc) of the PCs in the LT
and classrooms, and bring it along to the class.
Long
System Start-up Time
We have employed special Windows
XP features that did not exist in Windows 98 to enforce various
policies and settings so that the security and the reliability
of the PCs in the LT and classrooms can be further improved.
Besides, when some newly released security patches issued
by the Microsoft were applied, for some reasons, they will
make some PCs run very slowly and demand more memory. All
these led to the significant increase of the start-up time
for PCs, especially the old ones in the LT and classrooms.
To remedy the situation, new PCs with good CPU performance
and ample memory were immediately acquired to replace those
slow ones. As a result, the start-up time was cut from five
minutes to less than two minutes, and now our colleagues seem
to find the current start-up time acceptable.
Frequent
and Urgent Updates of Windows Bug Fixes and Virus Signature
File
To eliminate known and published
vulnerabilities of the Windows system and to protect users
from being attacked by virus and hackers, it is mandatory
to apply security patches and update virus signature files
in a timely fashion. These are huge and difficult tasks because
of the urgency and frequency of the work involved as well
as the inaccessibility of the LT and classrooms due to heavy
usage. In fact, the latter also prevents us from carrying
out on-site trouble-shooting or repair work quickly, and hence
very often causes delay in rectifying the problems. To strike
a balance between practicality and the urgency of applying
these software fixes, unless it is mandatory to perform the
upgrade/update at once, all massive upgrade or update of the
Windows operating system, browser plug-ins, or local software
will only be performed during every term break when the usage
of LT and classrooms is low.
Invoke
PowerPoint within a Web Page
A problem was found that users
could not invoke PowerPoint within a Web page in the Lecture
Theatre's PC. In fact, this was a general symptom of the Office
XP suite caused by a bug in the software and is subsequently
solved by applying the newly released patch.