Teaching Centre Configuration for Academic Year 2010/2011

Notes to Testers:

Application testing is taking place in the Chadwick teaching centre (CHAD, or CTC), room T10 on the ground floor.

Please report problems to Lisa Nelson. Please note that I'm on holiday until July, but send me your problem reports anyway and I will work on them when I get back.

In your testing, please:

• Log on as yourself. If you want to test something where you know roaming profiles have caused a problem in the past, contact us for a test undergraduate account which you can log on as to do your testing.

 

• Try as many different features of the application as practical. Make your testing as thorough as possible. If, in your classes, you will be performing a known series of steps, try performing exactly those steps.

Notes About Preinstalled Additional Applications:

Important: Each additional application will only be installed on some computers. In the past, we have generally installed all the additional applications on all the computers, but this year there are just too many. Therefore we have divided them into sets and installed each set on only some of the computers in CHAD. See What's Installed Where for more details. Also, we have installed no additional applications at all on two computers, so that you can get an idea of what Windows 7's expected performance level can be when it isn't bogged down with additional applications.

Also Important: Several additional applications normally preinstalled in Teaching Centres ARE NOT PREINSTALLED in the test Teaching Centre, usually because we do not currently have a Windows 7-compatible version. See What's Not Installed for more details.

Please note that, except on the two computers where no additional applications are installed, booting and logon will be very slow. General performance will also be sluggish. This is expected, because of the vast number of additional applications installed. (Which is, incidentally, why we don't preinstall everything everywhere.)

Status of Reported Issues:

Changes to Windows:

• The version of Windows will change from XP SP3 to Windows 7 (32-bit). This changes everything.
• The version of Internet Explorer will change from 7 to 8. This changes everything else!

Changes to Applications:

The following applications are new, or new versions this year.

Other applications can be assumed to be unchanged from the current Teaching Centre configuration, but they should be tested in the new environment nevertheless, in case of interactions with other applications or changes.

What's Not Installed:

The following additional applications are NOT preinstalled in the test centre.

What's Installed Where?

For additional applications, wherever possible, I have tried to keep related applications together so that a given tester doesn't find their applications split across multiple computers. This isn't always possible, so apologies if yours haven't worked out.

Below are the lists of the additional applications that constitute each set. Below that, there is a diagram indicating the layout of the computers in CHAD, showing, for each station number, the set(s) installed on it. (For example, station 13, which is the fourth computer in from the door on the right-hand side, has applications set B only. There is a label on each desk telling you the station number.)

Additional Application Sets:

Layout of CHAD:

Don't worry if you can't make heads or tails of the diagram; there is another way you can find your applications. At any given computer, just press Ctrl-Alt-Del as if you were about to log on. Before the logon dialog appears, a list will pop up showing all the additional applications that have been preinstalled on that computer. If no list appears, there are no additional applications.