The Technical Support Staff maintains a networked system of over 150 computers in three academic departments. We take steps to ensure the security of the systems, while attempting to meet the computing needs of faculty and students.

• Technical support is available for all Department-purchased hardware and software installed on systems that we administer, except where noted otherwise. Occasionally, we may notify users that specific software will no longer be supported because it has been deprecated (as was the case when Netscape was replaced by Mozilla). Such software is usually scheduled to be removed from our systems at a semester boundary, and is provided in the interim as a courtesy to users.
• Except when required by security flaws and serious functional issues, we will only deploy software upgrades on semester boundaries. This minimizes the effect of system changes on classwork in progress. Any software upgrade that may interfere with computing (such as kernel upgrades) will be preceeded by email notification. Smaller upgrades unlikely to interrupt progress will be performed without notice.
• We provide support for configuration and functional issues with installed software. We do not provide reference or how-to support. Such information is usually easily available through other channels. Our support site lists several references for users unfamiliar with UNIX-like computing environments and the software accompanying them.
• The officially supported computing environment is OpenSuSE 10.2 with KDE or Gnome. Users are free to install other window managers, but we are unable to support them. We also support Mac OS X 10.4.
• We cannot provide support for personally-owned machines. Only machines purchased with Department funds, research grants, or through the Equipment Trust Fund will be supported (as long as they run a supported operating system).

Representatives are on duty from 9AM - 5PM on days when the College is open for business. Reduced support hours may or may not be provided when classes are not in session. Users will be notified via email of unusual support hours.

To receive technical support, send email to 1qtechie. You will receive an automated confirmation of request receipt and a tracking number to which you can refer in future correspondence. To ensure proper handling of your requests, do not modify the subject line when replying to any email received from the Support Staff.

In order to submit requests using the techie alias, you must be using an email account from within the William and Mary domain. Email accounts provided by IT or any academic department fall into this category. Out-of-system emails are discarded by our request system. If you do not receive the acknowledgement email within the hour, you should assume that we did not receive your request.

You can also view our current request queue and recently resolved requests by clicking the "Current and Recent Issues" link on the systems webpage.

Please refrain from sending HTML-formatted email or attachments of any kind. The request system is designed to handle only plain-text email.

If you are unable to send email, call 757-221-3464. We ask that you send email when possible, because it is automatically logged in our request tracking system and provides a reference for future requests.