I know a lot of people were very upset with the new printers.  We got them on state contract and we get free toner and service for four years while we are leasing them.  I am not happy with the printers myself, but service is quick and we are trying to work the bugs out of the new system. The reason we got the new printers is due to budget cuts (paper is cheap, but toner is about $200 a cartridge and we never get 20,000 pages out of a cartridge; 10,000 is more realistic). 

I have the technology and ability to control printing abuse through print quotas and page limiters, but I do not have permission to do so.  If you want me to put a stop to wasteful printing, the graduate students need to let the Grainger Administration know.  Your professors think they are doing you a favor by putting course materials online so you can print for free.  Tell them you'd rather pay for booklets than go through the headache of trying to print them off in the lab.  As for PDF printing, there is not much I can do, except install page limiters so no one can print more than 20-25 pages at a time (this would stop most large PDFs and the book printers).  Another option is to let me know when someone prints a large PDF and hogs the printers up and I will have a word with them.

Wireless printing is not possible because of a Firewall that was put up to protect Grainger Hall.  Since the wireless network is not part of the Grainger Hall internal network, PCs on the wireless network are unable to efficiently communicate with Grainger Hall resources.  Hopefully, this will be changing soon.

Color printing is available in the Multimedia Lab.

The double sided printing option is meant to reduce paper use.  Printing comes out of the lab budget.  I need to keep my costs down.

The problem with one printer getting all the print jobs is fixed.  Print jobs should be equally distributed between the two printers now.

Providing better paper is hard to do.  I normally tell people to use the lab when it is not busy or use the Multimedia lab for printing on media other than the paper in the printers.

TAs, you have 1 printer for 9 PCs.  If you are having trouble getting your print jobs through, you need to talk to your fellow TAs.  Same thing for PHDs.

1. Grainger Hall is open from 7AM until 11PM.  I can not keep the labs open past 11PM since the building is technically closed and you are not supposed to be in it unless you have an after hours pass (like some TAs or PhDs do).  Therefore, I can not keep the lab open until 1AM (or midnight, or 2AM, or for 24 hours).  This is not something I can change.
2. Keeping the lab open costs money (paying an employee, increased electricity costs since all the PCs and the printers come out of power save mode, etc.).  If only 5 people are using the lab during a given time period, it is not very cost effective to staff the lab and keep it open.

Also, remember that consultants are required to enforce lab rules.  If they are overly rude while trying to enforce the rules, let me know, but the fact that they are asking you to stop doing something is not rudeness in itself.

As for limited technical ability, we are working on improving that.  We plan on hiring more technically savvy students in the fall, as well as requiring that non-savvy students attend DOIT STS classes for applications we have in the labs.  All lab consultants are full administrators of lab PCs and they have the permissions required to fix PC problems, just not always the knowledge.  Remember, these are consultants, not technicians.

When I took this position, as Lab Manager, the computer labs were FILTHY!  The keyboards and mice were sticky and dirty and people would write papers thhhhhhhhhat kind   a loooooked like thisssss.  The desks all had a rather unpleasant film on them.  It took 5 people 3 days just to clean up the Undergraduate Lab and we had to replace well over a dozen keyboards and mice.  So, I took a rather draconian stance on food and drink and I prohibited it completely.

Now, enforcing a no food or drink rule is a major inconvenience, not only for you, but also for my staff and myself.  However, I need to be able to keep the lab clean and functioning (no, I don't enforce this rule because I am a control freak or something).  So it basically boils down to this, you want to drink, I want to let you drink, but I need to keep the labs clean (I know about the dust, the consultants will try to keep up with it).

So here is what I will consider.  I will consider allowing closed containers for drinks.  I will also consider permanently revoking the lab privileges of any person who makes a mess and does not clean it up (I'll provide cleaning supplies).  I'll formalize a policy detailing the rules, the enforcement, and the consequences and get it out before Fall semester.

Be responsible about this and I'll never have to institute and enforce a strict food & drink policy again.  That means cleaning up your messes and making sure your classmates do the same.  It also means letting lab staff know about a mess someone left so we can get it cleaned up immediately and try to make sure it does not happen again.

The only explanation I have ever found for this is the fact that a lot of the networking in Grainger Hall is too old.  Slow logins are not due to downloading files to your desktop or My Docs folder (you never actually download these files), but are most likely due to slow drive mapping and other network connections.  We are looking into the problem and we hope to be putting in some long overdue network upgrades over the summer that should reduce this problem.

Why?  Because we had many problems with students going well over their quota.  If you need more space for files, please come talk to me and we can try to work something out (are you TAs reading this?).

Again, I would like to thank you for taking the time to fill out these surveys.