NEWS

Welcome New Members!

Hopefully, we've gotten to welcome each of you in person either at our orientation sessions last week or at the SSCC Help Desk office. If we haven't though, please drop by Social Sciences 4226 to pick up a packet of information and to sign up for a short computer orientation sesion. (School of Education members should visit with their department's Technology Support Contact.) During orientation, SSCC staff will talk to you about your computing needs and try to identify which of the many SSCC services and computing resources will be most useful to you. This makes it time well spent even for the most experienced computer users.

Help Desk Office Experiencing Delays

Due to the large volume of requests we are currently receiving in our Help Desk office, expect a longer than usual delay in hearing back from the SSCC staff person assigned your problem. This is especially true for PC support requests which may take several days. We are usually able to tend to other requests within one business day. If you wish to inquire about the status of your request, contact Nancy McDermott, Director of SSCC.

SSCC's Fall Training Schedule

SSCC's Fall training schedule is now available on SSCC's training web pages. Once again we are teaming up with Sociology 365, Computing in Social Research, so you'll find many topics offered Tuesday/Thursdays, 4:00-5:15, including several SAS classes. Remember that all SSCC training sessions (including Soc 365 sessions) require preregistration.

Tip: Save Files on Network Drives

We strongly recommend that you save all work-related files on network drives. Network drives are more reliable than standard PC hard drives and are backed up every night. We hate to see anyone lose data due to a hard drive crash. Network drives are also convenient to use: you can easily get access to files on network drives from home or other locations simply by logging into Winstat.

It's especially important to save files on network drives when using Winstat: never save files on the Desktop or in My Documents on Winstat. If you save a file on your Desktop or in My Documents while using Winstat, the file becomes part of your Winstat "profile." Profiles are not backed up, and profiles can easily become corrupted (especially if you don't log off of Winstat when you're done using it). Also, when you log in Winstat must download your profile to the particular server you're using, so large profiles make for slow logins. Always save files on network drives like U: instead.