Using computers in the department and in UCL

Computers at UCL

The UCL Information Services website has comprehensive information about:

Computers in the department

The PCs in rooms10
The PCs in Speech Sciences Lab and Speech Sciences Seminar Room
Software for specific courses
Where to get help

Departmental Facilities

The Department of Phonetics and Linguistics provides a range of facilites in addition to those available from IS. These include student computer rooms and the provision of specialised speech and language software and hardware. Networked computing hardware consists of two Sun SPARC workstations and peripherals, approximately one hundred PC's, one Apple Power Mac, six laser printers, one colour A3 printer, three scanners, and DAT data drives. These devices are all connected to the Internet and located at Wolfson House, 4 Stephenson Way, and at 20 and 21 Gordon Square. The computers (PCs) for general student use are located in room 10, 21 Gordon Square. The PCs in the Speech Science Laboratory and the Speech Science Common Room may also be available outside term time. The computer room (G33) at Wolfson House has a Sun SPARC Station, two PCs, a scanner and a DAT recorder with a digital link to one of the PCs. Accounts on the Sun SPARC Stations are issued to all staff and students of the department if the facilities provided by IS do not meet their needs.

The PCs in room 10

There are six PCs for general use in room 10, 21 Gordon Square. Entry to the rooms is by digital keypad - you will be told the entry code. There is no booking system in operation so availability is on a first come, first served basis. Five of the computers run Windows 98 and there are some small differences in their hardware configurations. PC 82 has a PCLX card connected to an LX processor, PC 83 has a CD writer, and PC 85 has a 250 MB zip drive. The sixth computer is an I.S. managed PC and behaves like a cluster room machine.

The PCs are not left permanantly on, so it may be necessary to switch on at the wall socket and also at the computer and monitor power switches. (Please remember to switch off at the wall socket when you finish your session). The PC's take up to about 90 seconds to bootup and will prompt for a login name and password - this information is available in the room. Note that when using the Windows 98 PCs, you cannot access files on the IS computer socrates from the PCs in these rooms. (So there is no drive R: like there is on an D cluster room PC). If you want to work on a file that you have created on a cluster PC then you must bring it to room 10 on a floppy disk. You can temporarily save your work on drive S: but the file will be accessible ( and deletable) by anyone so for greater security it is better to use your own disk in the floppy disk drive. (Drive A: on all the PCs). Please do not put files on the hard disk drive (drive C:).

The following programs are available on the Windows 98 PCs:

Wordprocessors: Word97. The PCs also have other components of Microsoft Office 97. ( Excel and Powerpoint).

Web Browsers: Internet Explorer V5.0

Email: Elm on remote server - accessed by telnet.

Prolog: SWI-Prolog for Windows.

A Program Editor: PFE

Speech Processing: SFS V4.25.

Ghostscript/Ghostview (useful for viewing postscipt files).

Adobe Acrobat 4.05 (for viewing pdf files).

F-Secure V5.3 (Anti-Virus software).

The managed PC has the same facilites as a cluster room PC.

The PCs in Speech Sciences Lab and Speech Sciences Seminar Room

There are six PCs in the Speech Sciences Lab and another two in the Speech Sciences Seminar Room at Wolfson House. Although not intended for general use (email, web browsing and word processing) these machines are available to students when they need the specific software installed on them. These computers are used extensively during term time but outside this they may be used, see David Cushing if you need to make use of them. All computers run windows 95 and most have a LX Processor with record and playback facilities.

The following programs are available on the PCs:

Sfswin: A suite of speech recording, editing, analysis and playback tools.

Wasp: For recording, analysis and playback of speech.

PCLX: For recording and analysis of speech and Lx.

SPSS: Statistics package.

Wordprocessors: Word95. The PCs also have other components of Microsoft Office 95. ( Excel and Powerpoint).

Web Browsers: Internet Explorer V5.5

Adobe Acrobat 4.05 (for viewing pdf files).

F-Secure V4.09 (Anti-Virus software).

Mbrola and Mat Lab is also installed on a couple of the machines.

Software for specific courses

SFS

The Windows 98 PCs in room 10 contain the Windows version of the speech processing suite of programs known as SFS. Double click the SFS icon to start the program and check help for more details.

Prolog

Particularly for the benefit of those students doing a course in Cognitive Science or Computational Linguistics involving a programming component, all the PCs in room 10 have the programming language Prolog installed on them. The particular kind of Prolog (SWI-prolog) is identical to the Prolog on IS cluster PCs.

Prolog is normally used in conjunction with a program editor. The PCs in rooms 10 carry a Windows editor also available on the IS cluster PCs, namely PFE. It has been configured so that Prolog can be run from within PFE by clicking on the launch button in the button bar.

Where to get help

IS Help Page
Student IT Training