Logon

You may be able to set up a User Profile that will be called up from any computer on the network. This allows you to have your favorite color scheme, background picture, icon arrangement, and other user choices whenever you logon. You may not have this option in a school situation.

In a computer lab that is open to the general student body, you might need to log on only for functions like email or getting lesson materials for your particular class.

Passwords

The best password that is secure is a long random string of numbers, characters, and letters mixed up. But you do need to figure out a way to remember your password. (Writing it down and keeping it near the computer is the worst idea of all!) So get creative and take something you can remember but alter it in some creative way. Misspelled words work pretty well - the only time a talent for misspelling is an advantage!

Sharing a Printer

Depending on your network's setup, a window may popup to tell you when your print job has been sent to the printer.

View the print queue:

Method 1: Double-click on the printer icon that displays on the bottom right of the taskbar when you are printing.

Method 2: Open the list of Printers and Faxes (Start | Printers and Faxes) and double-click the icon of the printer you want to view.

The only print job that you can do anything about is the one from the computer you are using. This is a good thing! I don't want other folks deleting my print jobs for me!!

The window below shows a print queue, the list of documents waiting to be printed. You can see the name of document, the owner (the login of the person or the name of the computer that sent the job to the printer), the size of the document, and the time the job was sent. The Status column shows whether the job is printing now or is paused or has an error.

 

Notice the Error on the first job. This might mean that something has gone wrong with the printer. Perhaps it is out of paper or the paper has jammed. But it could mean that the server is too busy right this second to handle the print job. So don't panic. Wait a few seconds. The server may get free enough to go ahead with the job shortly. Don't send the job again until you are SURE that you need to do so.

Once your print job has been sent, you are free to continue work on whatever tasks you like. You may be notified by a little message or a bell when your pages are actually printed, or maybe not. Your computer thinks the job's finished when the order is sent out to the server. The server would have to send you a message that the actual printing had finished and that requires a printer that talks back to the server. On our little network this did not happen. You could watch the jobs vanishing off the queue, but that just meant that the printer's memory had the info now. It didn't mean that the pages were all done. You had to go look at the printer yourself.

Identify documents: When printing in a shared environment, be sure that your document can be identified as YOURS. You might get busy on another task and leave the printed pages sitting in the printer's outbox. If you expect anybody else who is using the printer to respect your work (and not trash it!), they need to be able to tell whose it is.

Class work: In a classroom setting, putting your name on the page somewhere, perhaps in the header or footer, is really important. Several of your classmates may be working on the same assignment at the same time. Once the pages are in the printer's stack of finished pages, you need to be able to tell whose identical document is whose. (Surely all of you did the assignment correctly. Right??)

Don't delete your document until you have the print-out in your hands! Save it, at least temporarily. If the power goes out or the printer has to be reset, your print job may be gone forever. If you don't have a copy somewhere of the document, you'll have to recreate it from scratch.

Good Manners

Crumbs, liquids, hard blows, sledgehammers can all damage a computer physically. How could you damage the computer's contents? Moving or deleting files and folders, changing system file information, formatting hard drives, deliberately infecting the computer with a virus are all ways to get in big trouble.

Clean up after yourself. Don't leave files on a network hard drive unless you have been assigned specific space for saving files. If you need to save something temporarily as you work, be sure to get rid of it before you leave.

Besides being good manners, you must assume that anything you save to the hard drive will not be there when you come back. Administrators will clean up the hard drive from time to time, deleting files that are not part of the original installation. If you want to work on a document later, you need to save it to a removable disk and bring it back with you.

Virus/Trojan/Worm

• Computer Virus: An unwanted computer program that tries to replicate itself and spread to other computers, often by hiding inside other files or programs. It is often destructive to the infected computer's data and or to the operation of the computer and its programs.
   

• Trojan: (short for Trojan horse) A program that does not appear to be destructive but which, in fact, allows others to access your data, to record your logins and passwords, or to destroy or alter your data.
   

• Worm: An unwanted computer program that duplicates itself across a computer network. It uses up the network's storage space and resources and can interfere with the ability of the network to function at all.

Once infected, a network can be haunted by a virus or a trojan or a worm. The whole idea behind these nasty creature is for them to duplicate themselves everywhere possible. Many will quickly copy themselves onto all the hard disks and all the removable disks that are used with any infected computer. They may use your email program to mail themselves to everyone in your address book. To completely disinfect the network requires disinfecting every disk and every file!

Prevention of infection is much better. So most networks run some kind of antivirus program regularly. Modern antivirus programs test for more than just plain viruses. They look for all kinds of destructive and annoying programs. You should let such software run in the background while you work. The software can catch a virus/trojan/worm before it has time to spread. Ask your network administrator how to use your network's antivirus program. Then use it!

Set your software to check every removable disk for viruses, etc., before it will be accessible to the network. The disk may have picked up a virus long ago and you not even know it. Some viruses only activate after a certain date or after a certain file is run. So you could have an infected disk for awhile before it tries to do anything nasty. This is the way networks get re-infected after thinking that the battle has been won.

~~  1 Cor. 10:31 ...whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.  ~~

Last updated: 22 Jan 2008