Curious download feature!

[Codebreaker]

I run evening classes at a local school on Elements. I bring along the images so that we all do the same thing and these are on a memory key.

The other night I downloaded the images onto most of the workstations without any problem. Then as I moved on to the next one the previous student said the images where no longer connected in the Organiser.

At the same time I noticed that I was downloading two of every image onto the next work station and at the next I was downloading four of every image.

It turned out that someone had set the downloaders to point back to the memory key. So as the images were being 'downloaded' they were actually being duplicated on the memory key and never on the hard drive. :confused:

I've tried to think of a possible use for this but can't come up with anything sensible.

Curious but useless I think :)

Colin

[Byron Gale]

...someone had set the downloaders to point back to the memory key...I've tried to think of a possible use for this but can't come up with anything sensible....Colin,

Is this a situation where all of the student machines receive a master software "image", and the master has been set in this odd manner? Or is it that someone went to each machine to make the change?

I can't imagine why you would want to "download" right back to the source drive...

Byron

[alibony]

Colin,

I worked for school that had computers in a computer lab and in the Library. Students were not allowed to save files to the hard drive - they had to use a USB drive (memory stick) or floppy disk (I know - some of those computers were very old).

I suspect that this might be the case where you are teaching, so the IT department probably set it up to save files to whatever external drive was present.

Karen

[Ric Cisson]

Colin,

I have had an experience that supports Karen's input. A local Parks and Recreation Department bought 4 new PC's for its' Adult Continuing Education series a couple of years ago. I don't know that this experience is exactly as Karen suggested, but I went to each of the four PC's with a Lexar Flash Drive, don't recall the model, but I do remember uploading a working file only to have it double "back" to the flash drive and by the time I was "done" I had 16 replicated files on the flash drive. I learned later that they did not want to accumulate any students files on their drives, so the IT hired, set each up to save to an external storage device...and I guess that was the flash drive from which it all began. I personally had never heard of such...but I guess it does exist.

[Codebreaker]

I suspect the real reason is that the daytime kids are messing around with the program.:rolleyes:

Everyone has limited space on the server to store their own images or whatever and it was only 3 out of 12 machines that behaved like this.

Colin