[WEB4LIB] RE: Patron Internet Machines

[Julia Schult]

Re: IE print capabilities: IMHO, IE 5.5 is superior to all previous web browsers
in its printing capabilities.  It automatically detects light text on a dark
background and reverses it for printing.  It allows you to select text and print
only the selected text.  It not only has Print Preview, but you can add a Print
Preview button to the toolbar.  It has special frames-handling capabilities so
that you can print out one frame or many frames together, though I have not
tried this feature.  I am quite leery of Microsloth products in general, but IE
5.5 has got the goods on printing and stability at the moment.  I would like to
be able to disable or delete some menu items on our public machines: mail,
newsgroups, and edit; I've got other menu items controlled with policies, but
can't figure out how to get rid of these.  (I did switch the mail item to send
users to hotmail rather than software on the machine itself.)

Re: Deep Freeze:  Fantastic product.  Does not seem to be related to any
crashing or hang-up problems on our machines.  Has saved me mucho mucho time.  I
use it combined with Windows policies for security, and have nothing but good
things to say about it.

Re: stability:  We have very few stability problems here with our public pcs.
The only one recurring is that annoying Netscape link failure one (mouse clicks
stop working on links).  That problem seems to occur in Navigator 4.08 and
Communicator 4.7x alike.  It also occurs in batches on the public computers, and
happens occasionally on our office computers which do not have Deep Freeze, so I
don't think it has anything to do with Deep Freeze.  The obvious fix for that
one is to move to IE.

That said, here's my take on How To Fix Public PC Instability:  Take a machine
out of your public area (as "typical" a machine as you can) into a work area and
rebuild it from scratch, one piece at a time, and see where it becomes
unstable.  Format the hard drive.  check it.  Install the system (presumeably
Windows) in as bare-boned a fashion as will fit your needs, with no extra
software like IE or AIM, etc.(Notepad won't hurt anything, though.)  check it.
Add your system settings (Policy editing, Tweakui, and so on).  check it.  Add
just the browser, with no plug-ins.  check it.  Add the plug-ins.  check it.
Add the security software (a prime suspect, I would say).  check it.  Once it is
working the way you want, I recommend Deep Freeze so that you know it will stay
that way.  Ghost by Semantec is a great way (that most of you already seem to
use) to save that "golden" computer setup and copy it onto other machines.
Obviously this process takes a lot of time, but it may be the only way to get a
stable system.

My $.02; okay, at least $.04.

---Julia E. Schult
Access/Electronic Services Librarian
Elmira College
Jschult at elmira.edu



"D. Popeck" wrote:

> >With public computers that have 32, 48, or 64mb, and range from
> >Pentium 200s to P2-333s, we almost never have crashes, except for
> >occasional patrons who lock them up with spawned pornsite windows.
> >They're protected with WinSelect and DeepFreeze.  Staff who have frequent
> >crashes in Netscape are encouraged to use IE...but some won't, and
> >would rather whine to us.  Their problem, not mine.
>
> We are using the Deep Freeze demo (along with Winselect's Ikiosk and Policy)
> and I see no new problems, just the same old NN 4.08 bugs. We may add access
> to IE again to see if it can decrease crashes. Has Microsoft put a print
> preview into its browser? We encourage patrons to print preview and select
> pages to pare down on paper use; I also added Notepad to the desktop for
> patrons to use for pages that don't seem to print out correctly or those who
> just wish to surf and print all in one document formatted to their liking.
>
> D. Popeck
> Madison Library

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