Workstation Best Practices

---

Want to make sure your Workstation is kept in tip-top shape? Here's a few suggestions to keep in mind!

Keep Your Desktop Clean

Just like your physical desk, a cluttered workstation desktop doesn't do you any favors for keeping your files and folders clean, neat or organized. The desktop is a great landing place for new documents, but is a poor long-term storage location. If you need to save a file for long term use, we recommend you use your J: Drive, K: Drive, or WNCC OneDrive as a permanent home for your documents and files. Remember: Files saved to your desktop are NOT backed up, which means if something bad happens to those files, they cannot be recovered!

Mind Your Open Programs

The number of programs you have running simultaneously can have an impact on the performance of your workstation. If you don't need 20 tabs of Chrome running at the same time, close down the tabs you don't need! This is especially important on VDI, as your computing resources on your VM are shared with other sessions.

Ensure Your Physical & Digital Security

Security isn't just a concept within the confines of your digital work space. There are all sorts of bits of information that could exist on your physical desktop that could be used by somebody walking by to commit Identity Theft, such as:

• Colleague ID Numbers or Social Security Numbers
• Passwords on Sticky Notes (hidden or not)
• Credit Card Numbers
• Student or Employee Personally Identifiable Information (Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers, etc.)

The presence of this information on your physical desk must be kept to a minimum, if not outright eliminated, in order to ensure the safe and secure handling of sensitive information. Remember, it could be YOUR information on somebody else's desk that could be in plain view of an passerby.

To help prevent unauthorized access to secure WNCC Assets on your workstation, be sure to Lock your Workstation when you're not using it! If you leave your workstation unlocked when you leave, somebody else could walk in behind and have access to the above listed information!

To Shut Down, or Not to Shut Down

Done for the day? Go ahead and save all your work, exit your programs, and Sign Out of your computer. DO NOT, however, Shut Down your computer! Why? The IT Department utilizes the evening hours to install critical updates to Windows and other programs on institution PCs. These updates would otherwise be disruptive to user workflows, as these updates require restarts in order to complete. So, to help us keep your workstation up to date, and to keep your work during the day uninterrupted, we ask that you DO NOT Shut Down your PC when you're done for the day. Instead, simply Sign Out of your computer, and leave it on. Follow this link to find out how to Sign Out of your workstation.


- Your WNCC IT Team