Hardware and Software Update Page

Welcome to Engineering College Computing. As part of our ongoing mission to maintain up-to-date facilities for our students, several changes and upgrades have taken place over the summer in our labs. To help our students and users to fully understand the capabilities of our new labs and equipment, we offer this page as a "What's New" index of our services.

New Hardware

Computer LabsNew Desktop ComputerNew Monitor
NI1013
NI1072
NI1075
NE1002
NE1047
PL2600
Dell Optiplex 960 Minitower 24 in. LCD Monitor
PL2650
PL2700
Auditorium
Dell Optiplex 960 Minitower 20 in. LCD monitor
NE1300 New
NE1320 New
NE1360 New
Dell Optiplex 755 Minitower and Desktop 20 in. LCD monitor

The changes above were made due to the University's policy of maintaining top equipment. After all the changes are made, no computer in the ECC labs will be over two years old, thanks in part to the funds generated by the Student Technology fee paid by Engineering students to enable these necessary changes. The three new labs are part of Engineering Technology, which has relocated to join the rest of the Engineering College at the Engineering Campus.


To help illustrate the upgrades our labs are undergoing, the following table compares the old systems with the new:

Hardware Comparison

 Dell Optiplex GX 620 Small MinitowerDell Optiplex 960 Minitower New
Processor Intel Pentium 4 650 Core 2 Duo E8600
Processor Clock Speed 3.40 GHz 3.40 GHz
Memory Capacity 2048MB, Non-ECC, 533Mhz DDR2 (4x512MB) 4GB, Non-ECC, 800MHz DDR2, (2X2GB)
DVD-ROM 16X DVD-ROM 16X DVD-ROM
Graphics Card 128MB ATI Radeon X600SE 256MB ATI RADEON HD 3450
Operating System Windows XP Professional Version with SP2 Windows XP PRO SP3


Along with the new hardware, several new software packages are now available to ECC users. Several of these programs come from Engineering Technology, due to the move onto the Engineering College's campus. Also, many of our existing packages have received updates as well.

Software Updates

New ET SoftwareNew ECC SoftwareUpdated Software
-Bentley Architecture 8.05
-Bentley InRoads XM
-Bentley Microstation V8
-Bentley TriForma
-EMCO
-Haested Methods
-NI Circuit Design Suite 10
-QBasic 4.5
-Revit Architecture 2009
-SketchUp 7
-Tahoe HydroFlow
-Tahoe PumpBase
-WinEstimating
-XSTools
-Microsoft Forefront Antivirus
-WinSCP
-Adobe Acrobat Reader 9
-Autodesk Autocad 2009
-Autodesk Civil3d 2009
-Autodesk Land Desktop 2009
-Geostudio 2007
-Matlab R2008b & R2009a
-National Instruments -> Labview 8.7
-Solidworks 2009 with COSMOS 2009


Matlab Software Usage Update

The College of Engineering has two types of licenses from Mathworks, the company that makes Matlab: classroom and research. The classroom license is limited to instructional use. Because of concersn expressed by Mathworks about the use of classroom licenses for research activities, on October 12, 2009 ECC began limiting the total amount of processor time that a Matlab process can consume in the ECC labs to 30 seconds, raised to 6minutes October 20, since instructional use of Matlab generally consumes a small amount of processor time. Research licenses are available in all College of Engineering research labs for Matlab, SIMULINK, Control Toolbox and Symbolic Toolbox. Licenses for other toolboxes may be purchased by faculty for individual use on research projects by sending a request to Greg Gaustad, the Director of ECC.

Note that the CPU limit has the added benefit of stopping runaway processes.


If you should have any questions about the changes on campus this fall, please contact us at: ecc-service@eng.utoledo.edu. You can also stop by the Help Desk in NI 1013 during regular hours: 8:00 AM - 5:00PM, Monday through Friday.

Jacob Niese
ECC Consultant


Last Updated: August 19, 2009 by Jacob Niese