Public Labs

Overview

The ITS Helpdesk supports and maintains a number of public lab spaces across campus. These differ from departmental lab spaces in that their use is not restricted to people associated with or taking classes with a particular academic department (e.g. Geology, Biology). 

Public labs are open for anyone on campus to use. Spaces that are also designated as Classroom Labs may be reserved for classes by the Registrar's office during weekdays, but are available to all at any other time.

Computers installed in public labs are configured to be "refreshing" computers, which simply means that, upon logout or restart, they remove any changes made during a particular login session and revert to their original configuration. This has several benefits for a shared use environment such as a public computer lab: it preserves privacy by eliminating any possible personal data, browser history, etc.; it guarantees a clean, functional environment for the next person to use the machine; it offers protection against accidental malware infections.

The computers installed in most public lab spaces are dual-boot iMacs, which means that the offer both MacOS and Windows operating systems. As of summer 2022, however, this is changing due to hardware changes in Apple's equipment (the move from Intel based processors to their own Silicon processors eliminates the ability to run Windows on the hardware). As equipment ages out in these spaces, ITS will consider how the equipment is replaced.

Finally, public lab computers offer a great many software applications in order to support our students in their class work across the curriculum. No one lab has every piece of software available on campus (with over 250 applications in use across the curriculum, this just isn't a practical possibility), but appropriate software is installed in targetted spaces (e.g. Chemistry software installed in Anders 327 next to the Chemistry department).

Here is a complete list of refreshing computers, including their software