PAT/electrical tests at Cardiff

hey...when i went to the accomodation i was reading the notice in reception about PAT (electrical) testing. It said that if you take the stuff to reception it is £2ish and item and if they come to your room its £5ish and item. i phoned taly south to find out if we have to have it doen straight away et but they sai there was no hope of getting it done before about monday and that they would have to come to the room.

does anyone have any more info in the PAT tests? how much stuff have you got to get tested? when are you getting it done?

also can we not use stuff until it is tested coz i've gotta set up my PC and tune in my TV while my dad is with me so i've gotta use it whether or not it has been tested really!

Reply 1

~Sam~

15

Erm...this is the first I've heard about an electrical test/PAT. What is a PAT??? :confused:

Reply 2

James_000

Haven't heard of them before. And not gunna pay them more money just to say I can use everything I've taken. I smell connage

Reply 3

emmz87

OP

PAT is like some test so that they know you haven't got bad wiring or summat that will trip the system/blow us all up in the middle of the night. i expect we'll be told when we collect our keys?!

Reply 4

Smaber

Yeah I heard about that too. And that we needed all the license stuff or something for any programmes we have. But I think they have to say that so no illegal copied disks find their way into their accomodation (pfft). I didn't realise it cost us. That's balloni!

Reply 5

CacheUK

the worst they can do is tel us that we need it checked though if they find out that we havent had it done - just play the idiot student, wont be too hard for us!

Reply 6

Alyn

PAT? **** that for cheese. I've got so much electrical stuff that I'll have no money left for drink. And I've got too much software licenses to cart all that about... sod that, I'm with James, connage galore. Anything for an extra £2 to deprive me of a pint.

Reply 7

Alyn

Smaber

Yeah I heard about that too. And that we needed all the license stuff or something for any programmes we have. But I think they have to say that so no illegal copied disks find their way into their accomodation (pfft). I didn't realise it cost us. That's balloni!

haha, oh they will have fun trying to check all the pirated copies of photoshop.

Reply 8

Pemj

Hmmm, thats a bit s*** - does anyone know whether the internet connection will be up and running on wednesday? and do we HAVE to have these PATs?

Reply 9

katie-bob

Hmm... I think they just need to test anything you want to plug in. I remember we had to get anything electrical that we brought for the commonroom tested officially before the school would let us plug it in.

As for licences etc, think they just want us to bring the original disks so we can reload all our software in case it all goes wrong.

Reply 10

act smiley

well, electrical testing fair enough although they're cheap, charging for it! As for the software licences thing, I have an official operating system for the first time since 1997, just in case. If they want to delve around my pc though, they can **** off! :/

Reply 11

jrhartley

13

This whole license thing seems like a lot of BS to me - who suddenly decided that the IT department of Cardiff university were part time sleuths moonlighting for m$ and Adobe? How long is it going to take them to go through everyone's software, forensically verifying if its legal or not? Don't they have anything better to do with their time - or are they on commission? I don't have the licenses for a lot of software on my PC as its with the firm who I freelance for - I wonder if I'm going to be expected to get them to fax over the multi-user certs from France. What's to stop anyone just adding hooky software at a later date anyway - or are our PCs going to be subject to spot checks by undercover IT geeks at any stage during our time there?

I'm sure none of this will happen - if it is, its far too 1984 for my liking and I will object on data protection grounds - how do I know he's not going through my Outlook files and nicking all my account details at the same time?

Reply 12

crimson_corm

yeah, finally, a frenchman who speaks sense.

its illegal for them to look on your hard drive without your concent and there was nothing in the contract of residences or your uni contract things youll sign at enrolement saying you will let them check your files and discs or that you wont run illegal software. Of the 314 programs installed on my system, 144 are freeware, 2 are paied for and the rest are downloaded. Its rediculous. The IT guys (who i shall be geting VERY well aquanted with being a compski student) will be strugling to run reslan and the general uni admin systems, let alone check ANYONEs let alone EVERYONEs pc's in halls. its utter crap. Also in taly north where im at there no reslan so they cant ask me to do anything with my pc as im not on their network and cant affect the uni in any way.

The data protection act 1987, 1995, 1999 and the melenium data security act 200, both form a legal protection you can use to say to anyone not just a uni but anyone - no, i legally own that hard drive, i legally own the data on it, as it my property and contains my data, you may not even be allowed to know it exsists without written concent to have that knowledge from me (see MDA2K Section 5 Paragraph 4 - bloody hilarious loop hole) and to be honest - the it guys are probably runing windows server 2K5 edition 6 already illegally and installed a load of cracked office disks across campus anyway.

so thats crap whoever started this stuff about software licences.

as for PAT - i dont know - sounds like something analy retentive enough to be true..

PAT/electrical tests at Cardiff

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