They have access to seven open access areas providing a total of 522 PCs on a Novell network. Most of these areas are open 12 hours per day during semester with reduced opening hours at weekends and outside semester. In addition, there are approximately 40 departmental workstation areas which contain more than 1,000 systems. Students use computers in a wide range of activities associated with their studies, including the preparation of course assignments, searches for information on the Internet, presentations using graphics and image processing, and enquiries about books in the Library. A range of software is available on the systems at each site to allow the students to prepare and present their work using word-processing, spreadsheets, graphics and statistics packages.
Electronic mail is available for communicating with lecturers and friends.
Computer based learning software is installed on the PC systems to help students become familiar with many of the general-purpose software packages. University Computing Services, located in the David Bates Building, provides computing facilities to assist the University in its teaching, research and administration. The Queen's University computer network is based on the latest Ethernet and FDDI technology. There is access to the network from all of the major buildings on campus and more than 2,000 devices of various kinds are attached to the network. There is a supercomputer, an IBM SP, to facilitate compute intensive work and a limited number of specialist classes.