The aim of the University Desktop Service is to provide a standardised desktop to all users, however, you may feel that this does not work for you. Here we have a number of tips that can help with the performance of your UDS machine, which will hopefully improve your user experience.
- You have 2GB of personal storage, you will see this as your (H:) drive in My Computer, as well as having access to departmental share areas, this will generally be your (S:) drive. However, your share drive might be listed under a different drive letter, or you may have more than one departmental share. You should not save any documents to the computers (D:) drive as this is not backed up and if there is a system failure this information could be lost.
- As a UDS user you can log in to any other UDS machine and you will see the personalised desktop you have created. The first time you log in to a new UDS machine, this machine has to talk back to our servers to retrieve this personal data and therefore, it may take slightly longer than usual to log in. You should only expect to see this the first time you log in to a new machine. Keeping the size of your roaming profile to a minimum should improve the time it takes to log in to a new UDS machine. If you are logging in to a projector PC to give a presentation for the first time give yourself extra time to log in.
- As a UDS user important updates are pushed out automatically to your PC, this could be Windows updates or updates for some of the specific software you use. These are applied when your machine starts up, if your machine has not been restarted for some time, you may have a lot of cumulative updates to apply, this could slow down your computers start up. Restart your machine regularly to keep your machine up to date (at least once a week), and you should avoid large numbers of updates. Restarting your machine regularly will also improve shut down speeds, if your machine is not switched off regularly, data will not be written back to your profile and the size of this will build up, therefore when you do switch off it will take longer to write this data back to your profile.
- Your UDS machine should have System Centre Endpoint Virus protection running, this will automatically check for the latest virus definition and keep your virus protection up to date. Please do not stop or interrupt any scans on your PC.
If you require any support for your UDS system, please log in to the IT Portal or call 0191 515 3333. Alternatively you can access the portal from the start menu of a UDS machine, click the Start Button in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, click on All Programs, and then click on MY IT Portal. This will take you to the portal and using the credentials you have logged on to the computer with, will log you into the portal.