Welcome to Hull

Library looking good

Welcome to Hull for new students. And welcome back to everyone else. I love it when we start the semester with good weather. It really shows off the place, which is looking lovely at the moment. Each year I put up a bunch of tips for new students, so here goes again:

1. Make sure that you have all your updates installed on your system. It doesn’t matter whether it is a Windows PC, a Mac or a Linux netbook. Find out how to check for updates and get everything up to date. At some point you will want to connect your machine up to a campus network of some kind, and if you don’t have all the latest security patches you may be vulnerable to infection.
2. Do something about viruses. At the very least make sure that your Windows PC has Microsoft Security Essentials installed and running, that the databases are up to date and that you run scans at reguar intevals. If you really want to install an anti-virus program don’t feel obliged to spend a lot of money, the AVG free anti-virus program is good and will cost you nothing. Get it from http://free.avg.com/. Please don’t spend huge amounts on some of the more expensive ones. The benefits are dubious and they also have annual renewal charges too.
3. Take a backup of your machine and leave it somewhere safe (perhaps even at home). Find out how to use the backup software on your machine and take a copy of everything. Use one of these cheap external hard disks that you can pick up for around 35 pounds or so from places like http://www.ebuyer.com/ or Staples, or even Tesco. That way if it all goes horribly wrong when you get to university you can recover your precious music, videos and other stuff. Once you have the backup habit, take one every month or so.
4. Don’t spend huge amounts on software just yet. Most universities (including ours at Hull) have deals that get you some programs that you need cheaply. The same goes for books. In the computing field they are rather expensive, and you don’t want to pay a lot for a book and then find out that it is only used for a small part of the course. You can check the books out in the library, and you might also find that there is a second hand book sale on your campus where you can pick up the required volumes from other students quite quickly. You might also want to form a little cartel with fellow students to share books between each other and spread the expense (this is also neat because it can also give you a ready made study group).
5. Get a usb memory stick . Keep backups of all your work on it. You can also use it to take files into the university to work on. You will get some filespace on the university network, but it will not be an enormous amount, and having your files always with you is useful. Put a file on the drive with your contact details (just your name and phone number) so that if you lose the drive people can find out who to return it to.
6. Get some free on line storage. I like Windows Live Skydrive: http://skydrive.live.com/. This gives you 25 GBytes of space which you can access from anywhere on the web via a browser. The major limitation is that files can’t be more than 100M in size, but this is a perfect place to lob all those important essays and program source files. You’ll need a Windows Live account to use this and the uploading and downloading of files is all via browser which is a bit of a pain but there is a tool called Gladinet: http://www.gladinet.com/ that is supposed make this storage available to your applications although I’ve not used it. You can also use Skydrive to make your files available to other people. The access is controlled via their Windows Live Accounts and you can just email them a link to the download location or folder you want them to have access too.
7. If you have more than one computer and you want to make sure that files are up to date on all of them you can use Windows Live Mesh for that: http://www.mesh.com/. Mesh gives you another 5G of free online storage and you can even synchronise files to Windows Mobile devices. Anyone who just stores their important files on their laptop hard disk is an idiot. These services are free and mean that you can get at your files from anywhere, and you will not lose them. If you want even more online space take a look at DropBox at http://www.getdropbox.com/. Dropbox and Live Mesh are also very good for sharing files with each other.
8. Make sure you have insurance for all your nice toys. It would be terrible if they got stolen or damaged before they were insured. Take a look at cover from student specialists like Endsleigh: http://www.endsleigh.co.uk/Student/Pages/student-insurance.aspx (if anyone knows any cheaper deals feel free to let me know and I’ll update this post)
9. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If something doesn’t make sense at the time make a note to follow it up later. Don’t let problems hang around until they seem to grow. Find someone and sort things out as soon as possible. Every department has people who know how everything works and can give you help. We have a fantastic team at Hull (I’ll let you find out who they are). If you have a problem, please come and let us help you with it.
10. Don’t worry. Really. You’ll be fine.

Comments

[Karl Johnson]

Good luck to all students (and staff!) at Hull this year.

It's both a lot easier and more complicated than when I started in 1991 - 5.25" floppy discs holding a whopping 360K of data! You'd still need plenty of them to back up a 40Meg hard disk (that my first PC at uni had, along with it's amber screen and Windows 3.0 running on an 8088 processor). And the internet? Well the WWW had only just been thought of and had to be accessed through the Sun workstations and Xwindows on the Mosaic browser. Otherwise it was FTP and PAD to get all those useful (?!) files off the internet. I guess we didn't have any gadgets worth nicking in those days though :)

The technology world has come a long way in 20 years!

[Danny]

Some good tips Rob, I've just joined your dept! :) Personally I much prefer Microsoft Security Essentials over AVG ad your insurance link doesn't work though! :) I think im doing/have done most of the stuff on here :D

If anyone's interested I have a blog about my first few days at uni: http://www.dannycomputerscientist.wordpress.com :)

[Etienne Schneider]

I agree with Danny for the MS Security Essentials, especially on Windows Vista and Seven (why bother?)

And good luck to Hull's students, and work hard but with fun. Keep in mind that a huge part of your results depends more on your work than on anything else.

[Rob]

Hi. I must admit (and I'll get into trouble if Systems read this and find out) that I don't actually have a proprietrary virus scanner on my machine. I use Microsoft Security Essentials and I do sensible things like not visiting warez sites or running any old program that is put in front of me. I also look for the https in web sites and don't respond to emails that I'm not expecting. And I've never had a virus.

Danny, good blog. Hope you can keep up the pace. Remeber, the first five years of blogging are the toughest.... I'll replace the insurance link with a different one that might work better for you.

Etienne - very good point about the work thing. I used to hate it when people said "you are so lucky, you are just good at this" when I had spent ages trying really hard to make the thing work....

[AlanW]

AVG Freeware was a bit too much for one of my older XP laptops to handle (it would churn away happily for 10-20 minutes when booting up), so another respectable free AV program worth trying is Avast from http://www.avast.com/en-us/index. Much snappier.

[Steve]

I would check out avast free anti-virus. i've experienced a lot of system slow downs with AVG, but avast seems great, it has a silent gaming mode also, and also detects whether or not the user is actively using the computer and works responsively. e.g. if it detects that you are gaming, it will only do essential quick file scans on important files such which are being launched, and won't start a full computer scan while your in the middle of a game, bringing your system to a halt.

anyway, check it out :)

http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download

[Ibrahim Khalil]

Hi Mr Miles,

I am a student of computer engineering and Microsoft Student Partner in Senegal in West Africa we have met in New York for the finals of Imagine Cup 2011.

I wonder if there is possibility of joining the University of Hull for next year.