At the beginning of the school year, the entire College of Education moved into a new building. We share the building with other departments. Our building is large with more than a dozen classrooms. We actually have more classrooms that we can fill each hour. As a result, we have a lot of students from other departments taking classes in our building.
Within our college we have always tried to have an open door policy. Any time I am in the office, I just leave my door open. This way, if someone stops by to see me, he/she will know I am in the building even if I am not in office. With all the students roaming our building, we have had a few security problems. On several occasions, faculty have come back to the office to find a student trying to use the faculty computer to print a paper for a class. Of course, most faculty keep things like student data (grades) and other private information on the office computer.
Most of our faculty have not had a reason to worry about computer security before now. Some have used the auto-login feature of the OS to avoid the hassles of typing a password every time the computer turns on. Also, few have used a screen saver with a password. We are now instituting these practices. Here are a couple of tips to help secure your PC, whether using XP of OS X.
If you are using OS X, here is a MacWorld article with several ways of quickly locking a computer: Quickly Lock Your Screen.
If you are using XP there are a couple of ways to quickly lock the computer. Pressing CTRL-ALT-Delete (all at the same time) will bring up the Windows security screen. One of the buttons will say Lock Computer. Pressing that button will do it. An even quicker way of locking the computer is to use the keyboard short-cut: Windows-L. Press and hold the Windows Logo key and the L key.
An extra safety measure that should always be used is a screen saver with a password. This is recommended because you want your computer to automatically lock if it has not been used for a period of time. You may not always remember to lock your computer when you leave the room, especially if you are not using the computer when you leave the area.