This morning a patron alerted me that Chrome and IE would not load Dropbox, Google, or Yahoo. Other websites were fine, and Firefox was fine. Rebooting seemed to solve the problem. If you notice similar issues, please do keep track of them for Julia.
Here's the word from Julia:
We decided to do a pilot project of changing the reboot schedule. The 7:30am reboot in Lamont has been suspended as of last night. Part of the reason for daily rebooting is so that the computer is “fresh” and anything wonky that was done to the computer by a previous user is gone. Also lagginess and memory problems are fixed by reboots.
We would like to have this pilot run for at least a month so that everyone gets a chance to see what that environment is like. For instance, do patrons start complaining computers are too slow? Is malicious activity happening when people don’t log out of their google account. Is one month a good chunk of time?
My understanding is that we are unable to change to default save location to “user files” because of the structure of Microsoft Windows & Microsoft Office. In the last two lost files cases having the default save location be “user files” would not have helped because the patron never clicked save. I do not know why patrons do this. In some cases they are repeatedly canceling when Microsoft Word suggest they save the document.
I believe that the pilot change in rebooting behavior will help with lost files (though as I said it may cause other problems). If after a month there is not a significant increase in other computer problems, then we can turn off the daily reboot permanently. If possible, we would want to get information from overnight staff and other access services staff. The staff that work with the public computers most frequently are a great source of information when we make changes. Is this modification in rebooting behavior something that we can work with?
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