Friday, November 26, 2004

Locked Public PC's will automatically log off after 15 minutes of inactivity.

As of a week ago, Information Commons staff have added a new feature to all 'locked' public PC's in Gerstein.

Anyone logged into the 'locked' PC's, and does not use the PC for 15 minutes will be automatically logged out by the network.

All documents or web pages that were open will be closed. Any unsaved changes will be lost.

Update:
Signs have been posted and all wallpaper for locked PC's has been modified to inform users of the auto-shutdown process.
Update: (June 2006)

It used to be the case that if a document was left open, the auto-shutdown process would not function.
This has been fixed...and I have had two users in two weeks who lost their document because of it.
The warning is clearly posted and users will have to learn to not leave their PC unattended for longer than 15 mninutes. But even more fundamental...all computer users must learn to repeatedly and frequently save their documents so changes are not lost.