Computer Facilities

A student computer lab is located in Room 7-250 for your convenience. Located here are PC and Macintosh computers with a wide range of software. Internet and email are accessible. We also have scanners, a CD burners, and free laser printing is available (SOS supplies the toner; you supply your own paper). the computer room is serviced by the Education Commons. Any problems should be reported to the Client Care Portal at extension 2232. If you want to book multimedia equipment for a presentation (for example, an LCD projector, DVD player, laptop computer, etc.) use the Ed Commons Multimedia Booking Form.

An Unofficial Guide to Email at OISE

1. Activate your UTORid. You must have your T-card with your library number first (if you haven’t already done so, you can get this done at Robarts Library in the T-card office). This will set you up with a login to be used for the various computer networks around the campus (except one; see below), including wireless. It will also activate an email address that will be something like firstname.lastname@utoronto.ca.
2. Starting this year, you will use your UTORid username and password to login to the 7th floor computer lab computers. Select “Logon to: UTORONTO.CA (Kerberos Realm).” For returning students, the previous Labs login still works (as of August 2007).
3. You also will have an OISE login for the “First Class” system. First Class is the proprietary (and legacy) email system that is used here at OISE. This account is already set up, with a probable login ID of your first initial and last name (e.g., Mary Surname would likely be msurname) and a password of your student number; the full email address would be msurname@oise.utoronto.ca in this case.
4. Choose one of your utoronto.ca or oise.utoronto.ca accounts as your official email notification account and enter it in ROSI (you are required to have an official notification email account with a utoronto.ca domain).
5. If you want to continue to use your current ISP and email, you can forward both your utoronto.ca and your FirstClass email to your current account. From the UTORid maintenance site, select “add, modify, or delete a forwarding address for your UTORmail mailbox.” This will forward your utoronto.ca email to your current email address. Next, login to First Class. Enter your FirstClass login (e.g., msurname) and your password (student number). Select Preferences from the left nav bar. Scroll down to the Messaging Mail Rules section, and set Automatically Forward to your current email address. (Make sure you have “Method: Redirect” selected). The SAVE button is at the bottom of the screen.
6. To set up wireless access on the U of T network, follow the instructions here.

If you have problems, you can visit the Robarts help desk for UTORid issues (main floor, straight back from the main entrance), the Education Commons help desk for First Class or OISE Labs account issues (OISE 3rd floor), or drop by the SOS office (7-158).

If You Bring Your Own Laptop

You can access the Internet by plugging in at the computer lab (2 open Ethernet connectors are available on the wall where the Macs are located).

To configure your computer to print on the AECP printer, do the following (instructions are for Windows users; Mac folks should be able to figure it out from these instructions):

1. The printer is an HP Laserjet 4250 Series PCL, located at address 142.150.97.179
2. Select “Printers and Faxes”
3. Select “Add a Printer”
4. Select “Local printer attached to this computer”
5. Select “Create a new port” and select “Standard TCP/IP Port”
6. Enter the address 142.150.97.179
7. When the selection dialog for printers appears, select HP Laserjet 4250 Series PCL. If you cannot find the printer among the selections, you need to download and install the drivers. See this post for more information.
8. Enter an appropriate name for the printer (“AECP Student Printer” is a good option, but anything will do).
9. Complete the wizard, and happy printing!

There is wireless access throughout the floor, but it is a tad sketchy in places. The instructions for configuring your machine for WiFi can be found here.

As a member of the University of Toronto community, you are entitled to a free version of Norton Antivirus, which you can download here. Additionally, you are strongly advised to enable Windows Firewall, or even better, download a personal firewall product like ZoneAlarm (or an equivalent product if you use Macintosh). If you are still using Internet Explorer as your browser, you are strongly advised to switch to Firefox.

Bibliographic Software

One of the best investments of time you can make is to use bibliographic software to store and manage the hundreds of references you will accumulate through your graduate experience. The University provides a service called RefWorks that will manage references and provide you with formatting options. However, once you leave the university, you lose access to this service, and your hundreds of references. Many people use EndNote or ProCite, but these are expensive solutions. Highly recommended is another product called Biblioscape, which has the functionality of EndNote (including direct import from Scholars Portal, JSTOR, Ebsco, and UTL (via RefWorks), but at half the price of EndNote for the Standard Version, and FREE for the “lite” version, called BiblioExpress. BiblioExpress is quite adequate for someone doing a Master’s degree, and the database can be imported to the full Biblioscape for any more advanced requirements.

Surviving IT @ OISE Links

Here is the page of links from the Surviving IT @ OISE seminar, including links to software, services, fun stuff and more!