LIMITATIONS OF THE BROOKS COMPUTER LAB
DESCRIPTION
The user computers in The Brooks lab are what are called in the academic world “thin clients” in that they are almost dumb terminals. They depend on a server for all there operations. They have no hard drive, or the ability to use a floppy, or flash drive for a storing documents. The users can use a folder on the hard drive called Document in the server computer to store documents, but for only limited purposes. The computers can send a document to the common printer.
LIMITATIONS WHEN SAVING A DOCUMENT
When a user wants to save a document, as indicated above, it must be saved to a folder on the hard drive of the server called Documents. There is no way to save to a floppy or flash drive or CD, so the work that is done in this lab is not transportable. You can send the document on an email to yourself to make it transportable but that is not very helpful when teaching the proper way to save documents. It is possible to create new subfolders on the Document folder on the hard drive. But is important to understand that these folders must be made unique for each person, and any one has access to these folders including being able to delete them.
TEACHING HOW TO MANAGE FILES AND FOLDER
It is almost impossible to how to teach comprehensive file and folder management on these computers because only the Documents folder is available. It is possible to build subfolders under the Documents folder. But that is it. No flash drives and on CD capability to show drag and drop operations.
THERE IS NO FLOPPY DRIVES, CD DRIVES, OR
It is not possible to bring documents into the classroom on Floppy disks or Flash drives or CDs and use them on the common computers. There is a USB port on the Instructors computer so that flash drives can be demonstrated on that computer.
RIGHT CLICKING
There is no right clicking capability. Therefore many operations that are accomplished with the right mouse button are not available.
As an example: I wanted to show the class how the change the size of the text on the Desktop. Can’t do it. The reason for this is they do not want their users to make any changes to the terminals. You can RC on the Internet. See below.S
NO MENU BAR
There is no Menu bar on Internet Explorer; therefore many of the operations that are done from those menus are not available. Example: one way to jump to another web site is to left click on File on the Menu bar and then left click on Open. That will give the user a dialog box to type in a new web address and then click OK to connect to the new address. This capability is not available on the Brooks computers.
On the Brooks computers to jump to another web site it is necessary to use the address field to do your jumping. There are instructions on the Brooks web site to do this. www.angelfire.com/blog/richnelson
LIMITED START MENU
Clicking on the Start button gives a VARY limited Start Menu. Also there is no MY Computer access anywhere on theses computer, and no access to the Control Panel. Also there is no All Programs access on the Start Menu
WHAT YOU CAN DO
On the Internet you can right click on a picture and left click on Copy. That will put it on the Clipboard. Then you can paste it to a document on word processing.
It is also possible to do a Save Picture As when you right click on it and put a picture in the My Pictures folder
There is a quick launch tray with Show Desktop and Internet Explorer. That’s it!
Printing can be done from the common computers
IN BROOKS FOLDER
