This 50,000 has been drawn from a variety of sources, including the money set aside for the Information Strategy. The feasibility of adding higher speed modems and support for ISDN-based connections is under consideration. In addition to the above PCs, IT Services has assisted with the installation of PCs in the Foreign Language Centre, Engineering, Psychology, and Mathematics. The applications software on all public access PCs has been upgraded from Microsoft Office 95 to Office 97. It should be noted that there are differences in file formats between the Office 95 versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint and the corresponding versions in Office 97.
Care is needed when working with files on both systems.
It should also be noted that Word 97 files are significantly larger than the corresponding Word 6 files. Support for PC clusters is now the responsibility of the Small Systems Team, which is part of Central Services, rather than the responsibility of the nearest distributed Helpdesk. The aim is to improve the service offered to users of these clusters whilst at the same time minimising the effects of staff reductions in the distributed support teams. During the Summer enforced use of the national WWW cache was introduced. Full information on required browser settings was made available and, in the main, the impact on the user service should have been minimal.