New Staff Thin Client system

Welcome to the new Staff Thin Client system.

We’ve worked really hard to make this system as pleasant, intuitive and productive as possible. This page details some of the enhancements and features we’ve added to make your computing experience the best yet.

• XP theme – This is perhaps the most noticeable difference. Your desktop now looks like Windows XP. If you’ve got this operating system on a PC at home then you’ll probably be used to the enhanced Start menu and modern visual styles. Should you wish to turn this off, you just need to go to Display properties, and on the Themes tab change the theme to Windows Classic. To change the Start menu back to the old-style right-click the Start button, choose properties and pick Classic Start menu. But we hope you won’t want to!

• Desktop backgrounds – Finally you can have a picture on your desktop again! Due to a technical limitation you should only use bitmap files. Most photos are JPEG files. However, you can convert them to a bitmap using various pieces of software - all available on your PC.

• Control panel – To make Thin Client as much like a normal PC as possible, we’ve enabled the Control Panel. This contains lots of settings and is worth familiarising yourself with. We’ve tried to make thin client as customisable as possible, so you can set it up how you want it.
• Volume control – The new software allows a master volume control, you can usually find this in the system tray (near the clock). It’s also available in Control Panel. There is another slight limitation here in that the “Mute” tick box does not work. If you wish to mute the sound, please drag the slider to the bottom, or plug in some headphones.
• Drive names – We’ve made the network drive names a bit more friendly and easy to read.
• Font smoothing – As most staff now have flat panel monitors this feature makes text much more readable and less blocky. You can control this from within the Display Properties - Appearance tab, click the Effects button.
• Faster logon time – We’ve streamlined the logon process to make more stuff happen faster. The new software is also more efficient at processing everything required to set up your desktop when you log on.
• Enhanced load balancing – This allows us to provide more power to certain applications, and means that a small minority of users don’t negatively impact the experiences of everyone else. It does mean that when loading certain applications you may see this type of box appear briefly:

• New hardware – We’ve got new servers with 16GB of RAM and 8 processing cores running at 3GHz each - In addition to all the existing hardware. Couple this with the new load balancing and we believe this will be the best performing thin client ever.
• Secure screen saver – if you leave your PC alone for half an hour without touching the keyboard or mouse, a secure screensaver will kick in. When you want to start using your PC again, it will require you to enter your password. Please always lock your computer when away from your desk. If you look in P:\Support, there’s a shortcut you can drag to the Quick Launch bar (usually just to the right of the Start Button) that will lock your computer with a single click. Otherwise just use Ctrl-Alt-Delete and then press space or click Lock Computer.
• Internet Explorer 7 – This introduces various new features, the most obvious of which is Tabbed Browsing. This allows you to open multiple websites at the same time, yet just have one Internet Explorer button on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. If you don’t like it, turn it off via Tools, Internet Options.
• Task Manager – This allows you to kill off applications that have stopped working. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and click Task Manager, or right-click an empty part of the taskbar and choose Task Manager.