As returning community members already know, summer is the time that ITS updates and refreshes various aspects of the public labs and instructor stations. This year we’ve updated a number of applications, such as Flash, Adobe Reader, and Firefox, to their current versions, but the most visible change is the move to Windows 10 on all public and classroom computers. Microsoft has made the interface more familiar than Windows 8, but there is a still a noticeable change from Windows 7, most visibly in the Start menu. Office has been updated to Office 2016, which has some minor visual changes. A comprehensive list of what software is installed can be found here: https://wiki.carleton.edu/x/4KS6.
We have found that Windows 10 loads much more slowly on the lab computers than Windows 7 did, and we are working to speed it up. One part of the problem is a bug in the “DeepFreeze” software we use to keep the computers consistent and safe from user to user, which is being addressed by the DeepFreeze vendor; as we are not the only school experiencing the problem, we are expecting them to resolve it relatively quickly, and we hope to put their patch in place no later than MidTerm Break. Another main contributing factor is the speed of the hard drives in the lab computers; Windows 10 is heavily optimized to work on the newer, much more expensive solid state drives (SSDs), instead of the more common spinning disks. We will be replacing the spinning disks with SSDs in the iMacs in CMC102, 110, 201 and 306 as quickly as we can, but it is a fairly labor-intensive process, so it will take us several weeks to complete all of them.
We’ve also made some changes to the hardware in some classrooms. We are updating the look and feel of the classroom control touchscreens as we upgrade classroom electronics; rooms that we upgraded this summer have the new interface. We think you’ll find the new look easier to navigate. The following rooms have the new look:
- Leighton 301, 202
- Music 103 107
- Rec Center 226
- Laird 204
- Weitz 008, 132, 136, 138, 161, 172, 230, 231, 233, 235