Breakfast with the Library
As a thank you to the students, faculty and staff who use our services, a free Breakfast to Go was provided by Butler Libraries. Students were invited to grab a juice/water and a granola bar pack on their way to class.
Unveiling of this year’s READ posters
Butler Libraries hosted a READ Poster Unveiling reception as part of its National Library Week celebration activities. The Unveiling revealed this year’s Butler community READ poster participants. This year’s participants included faculty, student leaders, and the seniors of the male Butler basketball team.
It’s time for your friendly reminder. If you haven’t done it lately, you need to defragment your hard drive. This should be done at least monthly. To learn what it’s all about, scroll down for the gory details. To just defrag and move on, the instructions are here if you need them.
Defragmenting hard drive (C:)
- Click on Start – Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Disk Defragmenter
- Click the Defragment button.
- If you have less than 15% of your hard drive free, it will ask if you’re sure you want to defrag now anyway. Click Yes.
- (If it’s much less than 15%, you may want to delete some unneeded larger files or file folders (and empty the Trash) or else run the Defrag program a second time.)
OR
- Open My Computer
- Right click on C:
- Select “properties”
- Click on tab labeled “Tools”
- Under “Defragmentation” select
“Defragment Now”
- When the service opens first
select “Analyze”. After this runs it will tell you whether or not the
drive needs to be defragmented. If it does simply select the defragment
option.
What is file fragmentation
Sometimes when you install a program or create a data file, the file ends
up chopped up into chunks and stored in multiple locations on the disk. This
is called fragmentation.
What makes this happen?
When you first install your operating system and programs on your hard
disk, they are written to the disk, for the most part, in one contiguous block
without any gaps. The exceptions are certain system files that must be stored
in specific locations. Over time, as you create and then delete documents or
uninstall programs, once-filled locations are left empty and you end up with
files dotted all over the disk.
Now, when Windows is writing a file to the disk, it looks for a suitable
piece of free space in which to store it. What happens, then, when you copy a 40M
database or audio file to the disk and the biggest slice of free space is only
30M? Or say you modify an existing file, appending a whole bunch of data so
the file now takes up more space on the disk. To accommodate the files,
Windows writes the first part of the file in one section of the disk and then
scouts around for other places to store the rest of the file. The end result
is that a single file may be stored in several chunks scattered about the
disk.
Last night I had a student looking for a translation for a song by Brahms. Fortunately, I knew where to go, but I thought I should share it with the rest of our Reference-related people so it would be less esoteric. Or at least be searchable on the blog. 🙂
Translations of songs, whether grouped by language or by composer, are located in the Music & Fine Arts Reference section, in the ML40’s and ML50’s. It’s only a few shelves, so it’s easy to browse. (Location is down the center aisle, at the end on the left.)
Before you get alarmed, this will be happening on a weekend after Commencement.
On Friday, May 16, at 6:00pm, Information Resources will be taking down most of the on-campus systems so they can relocate to their new server room (part of the construction projects over there). This means moving the air conditioners, the UPS systems, and all the servers to a new location.
On-campus computers should still be able to access the internet, but it will be much slower. Most other services will be unavailable during this time, which should last from 24 to 30 hours. PALNI services should be unaffected, especially from off campus.
This is your regular reminder to use BU Files for saving documents, papers, class projects, etc.
Every student (and employee) has space on BUFiles for saving these kinds of files. This is typically mapped to your H: drive, so if you go to any lab computer and click on My Computer, the H: drive should point to your space on BU Files, which is entitled with your Butler username.
Do NOT save important documents to the “Default” or to “My Documents” on the computer you’re sitting at.
ALWAYS make sure you’re saving things to BUFiles (or H:).
Local computers get reimaged, have profiles deleted, etc., causing your files to disappear. This will NOT happen if you save your things on BUFiles. Plus, they will then be accessible from another computer on campus.
Every semester it seems we have a few students in the library who lose documents because they were not saving them to BUFiles. We hope you will read this and act on it before writing your big papers this semester.
If you have any questions about where to save files when you are using library computers, please ask at the Reference Desk.
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