Patron Internet Machines

[Mike Mitchell]

When I took this position a year ago the public computers were constantly
crashing and it took minutes for small print jobs to reach our two HP
laserjets. Staff was frustrated and students were leaving rather than wait
for print jobs to finally appear. The machines were mostly Micron P300,
64Mb RAM, running Win 95/98, Netscape 4.6*, Fortress, and Winselect.
Printing was through a Novell server somewhere else on campus (and back to
our printers).
	I stripped the machines of all extra trash. If the software and or options
weren't being used I removed them. Particularly MS "features" like
Exchange, Net Watcher, etc. No fancy desktop or themes. No "fast open"
stuff. I removed the Netscape Communicator blimp and installed 4.08. Ran
scandisk and defrag (first time in "awhile" for many of them). I removed
the IPX trash and setup IP printing using HP Jetdirect.
	Now the PCs rarely crash. Netscape will freeze once in a great while,
usually hanging on Javascript from Hotmail. Print jobs are done before the
students can get to the desk. PC maintenance used to be a full time job-
now I do other things like catalog, Web design, and system administration.
	I lately installed a shutdown utility (shutdown.exe) that reboots all the
machines early in the morning when no one is here. Occasionally one or two
will hang and it is almost inevitably the Java Console hung up that
prevented the reboot. I also am running Norton AV 4.0 Enterprise ed. Even
Microsloth's Office is installed on several/many machines and now that I've
upped the RAM on all those to at least 64 MB they are working fine too.
	So, bottom line to me is the more "stuff" on the machines, the more apt
they are to crash. Don't use AOL Instant Messanger? Delete it. Don't use
Amazing Tricks 3.98? Delete it.


Mike Mitchell
Systems Librarian
Southwest Texas Junior College
Uvalde, TX
http://library.swtjc.cc.tx.us
mike.mitchell at swtjc.cc.tx.us