TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Fall semester has come again. As we get back into our busy schedules I need to remind all of you – IT IS CRITICAL that your documents are being backed up regularly. Do not depend that your hard drive in the PC on your desk will not fail. In Microsoft Word (as well as WordPerfect for you die hards that still use it) make your home directory ("H") the default directory for all your documents. This also applies to Excel, Access, Power Point, SPSS, and any other software that you use to produce documents. Your home directory is located on our server which is backed up on a regular schedule. *If you have problems setting your home directory as default call me at x3816.

Our new server is installed and is named PRAXIS. It has a new operating system (Novell 5.0) and is being prepared to replace SSPAFAC as our only network server. This should occur within the next month. There are several steps I must take before the old server will come down and we all are converted over to the new one. You as an end-user should not notice any difference except that you will now have more space to put data on your home drive and on the common drive, and data transfer to and from the server should be faster. (The new server has 8GB on the DATA volume and 2GB on the APPS volume with 5GB free space for later usage. All data is compressed at about 63%, which interprets to a lot of storage space.)

Student labs will be opening with the new semester for extended hours. We hope to have coverage until 7 or 8pm in both labs and 4-6 hours on Saturday. Please encourage your students to visit the labs during open hours to do research on the internet, write their papers, check their e-mail, scan pictures and documents, print color charts and graphs, or learn new software. There are presently no classes scheduled in the Digital Lab in the Communication Building, so please consider using it for a class or two of technology awareness / training during the semester for any of your courses. Just call me with the dates and times so I can block out the time on the lab schedule and let the monitors know. Lab schedules and hardware / software lists are found on the internet at : http://oit.boisestate.edu/cs/services/labs1.html.