Computing Lab

The Department maintains a computing lab located in Room 135 consisting of 8 PCs and a network printer. Access to the lab is restricted with a cypher lock. For personal safety and security of the equipment, users are encouraged the leave the door closed, particularly at night and over weekends.

The current PCs are Dell Optiplex GX620 Small MiniTowers (P4 3.4GHz w/ 4GB memory and 80GB SATA II drives) running Windows XP. The network printer is an HP LaserJet P3015X. Budgets permitting, lab machines are refreshed on a four year cycle.

1. Lab Goals and Policies

• These PCs provide a shared resource for Department of Sociology graduate students. A variety of software (listed below) is installed. Some of the software is specialized and too expensive to purchase in more than small numbers of licenses. The lab provides access for all graduate students to these resources on a 7x24 basis.
• The lab affords a basic graduate-level instructional facility for statistics, methodology and other research topics in Sociology. Instructors and graduate students may reserve the lab with the computing staff for activities relating to graduate-level instruction or training. It provides a place to talk, share knowledge and work through research issues collaboratively. It facilitates graduate student professionalization.

• The lab is not intended for use of undergraduates or undergraduate teaching. It is not large enough for this purpose nor are undergraduate NetID accounts available on the lab machines. Instructors are encouraged to reserve OIT public computing labs for this purpose, including the 20 seat, dual boot (Mac/Windows) lab located across the hall in Room 133.

2. PC Layout

Use the following table as a point of reference for finding applications noted in the software configuration table below.

3. Software Configuration

The following table is an outline of the software currently installed on lab PCs. The version and number of copies of each application is noted along with some licensing details. All applications are installed by the computer staff in compliance with software license requirements. Users are not allowed to install applications.

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