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.