St Augustine's Catholic College > Department Information

Our computer systems harness modern technology to provide a high level of computing facilities. We offer our students access to over 600 PCs distributed over five large suites, several medium sized suites and 100+ wireless laptops.

Each student has a login account which also provides secure space to save work, an email address and weekly print credit. Our internet is provided by the SWGfL using a 8mb leased line. The filtering services provided by the SWGfL blocks inappropriate websites, and in addition we have our own local filters to ensure the students have a safe and productive internet access.

A large volume of software is made available to students of the college. We run Windows XP Professional throughout the college, with all PC's running the latest version of Microsoft Office 2003 which includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Publisher and Project. We have Macromedia Studio 8 which includes Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash.

It's important to have virus and spyware protection on all PC's.

It's just as important to keep this software up-to-date and to run frequent scans.

At St Augustine's Catholic College we run Sophos Anti-Virus, there are also some free anti-virus packages you may want to look at. For example, AVG and Avast both offer free non-commercial products. For spyware protection Windows Defender is an effective product, alternatively you could try Ad-Aware by Lavasoft or SpyBot from Safer-networking.

There are several companies that offer special prices to students, Microsoft and Adobe for example. The popular Microsoft Office 2003 suite contains everything you need for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, desktop publishing and more but can be expensive. A student licence is a cheaper alternative to paying the full price. Alternatively you could try a free alternative such as Open Office, It's compatible with Microsoft Office documents and is not significantly different to use.

For more software there is 'thebasement' from RM.com or Pugh.co.uk do a Students discount shop.