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Hello and welcome to our tutorial on logging in to the cal state Fullerton virtual computing lab environment
In this tutorial we are going to go ahead and show you how to log in to and use the campus virtual computer lab
So the first question you may be having is what is a virtual computer lab and how does it help me
Cal State Fullerton makes a wide variety of software applications available to our students to complete projects
Normally in order to use those applications you would have to have them either installed on your computer or you would have to come to campus and use one of our labs.
The virtual computer lab environment allows you to log in to a campus work station with any computer with a high speed internet connection and use it just as though you were sitting in a campus computer lab
And again, the only thing that is required is a high speed internet connection
You can see here, I’m actually using the Google chrome browser, but you can use any up to date browser such as internet explorer, Firefox, or safari.
It also doesn’t matter which platform your using. You could be on a windows computer or a Macintosh computer and this works equally as well
You can see here I’m on the campus home page
And to go to the virtual computer lab you’re going to type in vcl.fullerton.edu, when you do that, notice there is no www there, it is just vcl.fullerton.edu
You’re going to come here and its going to allow you to log in to the campus virtual computing lab
You’re going to select use your CSUF login and then you’re going to go ahead and click proceed to login
You come here, and on this screen you’re going to go ahead and enter in your campus username or campus wide id and your password
So I’ll go ahead and enter my information here and then click login
When I do that it’s going to bring you to the welcome screen for the virtual computing lab
Now, in order to use the campus lab workstation you have to set up a reservation
There is never a long wait to reserve a campus virtual computer lab station
The only thing you have to wait for is for it to actually be set up
Usually it takes about a minute
So I’m going to come over here to the left and click on new reservation
When I do that you’re going to come to this window that allows you to set up your reservation
You need to tell the system what applications you wish to use, when you want to use them, and how long you want to use them for
This drop down arrow here will contain a list of all the different applications you can access
The default is an image that has office 2010 and SPSS19 on it
But if I click this drop down arrow right here you can see a wide variety of other options tailored for different circumstances
For example here is an image that has adobe Dreamweaver and fireworks on it
Or here is another image that has Microsoft access and Visio
Probably the most popular one though is the Office 2010 image
So I’m going to go ahead and select that work station and I’m going to say I want to use this right now
And you can see the estimated time for this to set up is less than a minute
The final thing that you have to do is decide how long you want to use this lab work station for
Now this is an important consideration
The default is one hour here but you can select up to four hours
I’d always recommend that you select four hours even if you think you will only be using it for one or two hours because once the session is about to expire you will get a warning that says you have so long to log out of the system.
There is no way to extend the duration of a reservation
You can always go back in and set up another new reservation and continue working but your current reservation will close out
Once you see that warning it’s very important for you to save anything your working on and close out
Because after that warning you won’t get any additional warning the session is about to close
If it closes and you have not saved changes to either let’s say a flash drive or to your local hard drive then you would lose those changes
So I’ve selected four hours here and I’m going to go ahead and click create reservation
And after a moment you’re going to come to this reservation window and you have the opportunity to delete the reservation or edit it from this window
Now right now the lab station is being set up for you
And you can see here that your reservation is pending and the estimated complete time is about a minute
After about a minute you’re going to see another window to appear here that will allow you to enter your virtual computer lab environment
And here we are, and again you can end or edit this reservation
You can no longer edit once you connect though
So I’m going to click connect here and it’s going to bring me to this window
It’s going to tell me the IP address of the computer I’m using as well as my user ID which should be your campus wide id and your password
You’re going to want to write down this password because you’re going to need it in the next window and you can’t simply copy and paste it
Remember passwords are case sensitive
Now in order to log in to this virtual campus work station you’re going to need to set up a remote desktop connection file
So I’m going to go ahead here and click get RDP file, when I do that it’s going to download this file
Depending on what browser you’re in your going to have to go find that file and open it up
In Google chrome it gives you a tab right down here at the bottom
In other browsers such as internet explorer or Firefox it may download this file in your downloads folder
But regardless of where you download the file to all your need to click on it or double click on it to start the connection wizard
So I’m going to click right there and you’ll see it brings me up this window
If you don’t want this to pop up every time you can click don’t ask me again
I’m going to click connect and then yes
And it’s going to bring me to a screen that’s now going to allow me to log into a workstation
So I need to type in the password that it gave me on the previous screen
And you can actually, if I drag this down, you can actually see it right over here
So I’m going to type that in and then click ok
And again it may just take a little while for you to log in to this station
And you’ll see the setup is running
And eventually you’re going to go ahead and see all of your different items here
And I’m going to go ahead and move this over and make my window a little larger
And you can see actually I don’t have enough room in the video window but if I scroll down here you’re going to see your windows task bar and your start menu
So I can go ahead and click here on start and go to all programs and look in here and there is Microsoft office and there is word, excel, and PowerPoint there ready for me to use
So I can go ahead and click on excel here and it will start up that application and allow me to begin to use it
And again it’s just like starting a brand new computer so it’s going to ask me for my username here I can just leave this alone and click ok
And here I am inside of excel 2010
And again you’re going to have to go through this window here, you can just click on cancel right there and say don’t make any changes. That probably won’t come up for you
And you can see the environment that you can begin working in
If you wanted to close this application, again this is just like you’re on a campus workstation you come down here to your task bar right click and say close
And now I’m back here on my desktop
If we come here to the start menu you’re going to see again you’ve got everything you can normally access
Including my documents, my recent documents, my pictures so on and so forth
If I click on my documents right now you’re going to see there is really nothing in there
And again remember this is the my documents that is on the virtual work station not the my documents folder that is actually on your hard drive
So when you’re saving a file you need to make sure you save it onto your actual hard drive
If I come up here and double click on this top most icon you’re going to see you get the my computer open
You’re going to see also there is local disk c and again that is the local disk on the remote machine you’re working with
Your hard drive is actually right here, you can see its C on whatever you computer name is
And this would be your CD drive on your computer
If you were to insert a flash drive it would also appear here
So remember don’t save something into you’re my documents folder, save it either onto your hard drive or save it on a flash drive and copy it over to your computer
And remember once the dialog box comes up warning you that your session is about to end you need to immediately save whatever your working on and log out of the system
So that’s all there is to logging into and accessing applications in the virtual computer lab environment
If you have any questions you can contact the campus help desk at 657-278-7777