ITS upgrades two university computer labs

Information Technology Services is completing a series of hardware and software upgrades to two campus computer labs.

The labs, available to all faculty, staff and students, are located in 100 Butler Hall and Mitchell Memorial Library.

The labs' old dot-matrix printers have been replaced by new high-speed laser printers. Output to the new printers is provided by ITS at no cost to the user. In addition, the cost of color inkjet output has been reduced from $1 to 50 cents per page.

Twenty new Pentium-III WindowsNT workstations and 10 new Apple Macintosh G3s are being installed in the two labs, and the capacity of the Computer Commons Lab in the library is being expanded by 10 additional seats to a total of 80. The Butler Hall lab seats 70.

Computers in both labs will be equipped with Zip-100 drives to provide lab users more flexibility in using and saving large files. Zip-10 removable disks, available at most computer supply stores, can hold 100 megabytes of information-the equivalent of 60 floppy disks.

A 36-bit color, 600x600 dpi-scanning station also is being installed in each lab. The flatbed scanner will allow users to create full-color digital images and store them on floppy disks or Zip-100 disks for subsequent use.

Upgrading the networks from 10 MBPS switched Ethernet to 100 MBPS switched Fast Ethernet will enhance performance in the labs.

In addition, a number of open network connections will be added to the Butler Lab to accommodate students who want to bring their own computers to the lab and plug into the network.

The latest versions of several new software packages are being introduced in each lab. They include: Adobe PhotoShop 5.0, Adobe PageMaker 6.5, Adobe PageMill 3.0, Adobe Acrobat Suite 4.0, ESRI ArcView, AutoDesk AutoCAD 2000, Symantec/Norton AntiVirus, Zoom Text, JAWS Text to Speech, Microsoft Office 98 (Macintosh only), Microsoft Office 2000 Professional (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher), Microsoft Visual Studio 6 Enterprise (Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual FoxPro, Visual InterDev, Visual J++, SourceSafe), Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, Netscape Communicator 4.61, and WinZip 7.0.

In a continuing effort to improve the technical support it provides to campus, ITS staff members now will be available at the Butler Hall lab consulting desk between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m., Monday-Friday. The technicians will answer questions and assist users with computer-related problems.

ITS technical support also is available by contacting the Help Desk by telephone at 325-0631, or by e-mail at helpdesk@msstate.edu.

For more information, visit the ITS web site at www.its.msstate.edu.