School Computers Suck Agree or Disagree?

[hpkeeper]

I'm in one of the computer labs of my high school right now, and to prevent anybody from getting to anything usefull we are filtered by an online filtering system known as "Bess". That's not the best part... I think they stuck these "Pentium II" stickers onto these computers because they're slower than all hell... at least the hard drives are. So that's two negatives, Slow machines and can't get anywheres good (of course I got here, which is good enough to keep me distracted during Government class)hehe... But the bandwidth on these computers is horrid to... so the "educational" sites you can get to, take forever to load... does anyone else have this problem in their High school or college?

 

[CirekL]

I work at a college computer lab. I'm on the Dell PIII 600 right now, no restrictions. We have some P Pros, some PII 266 which I find horribly slow. But we do have some Delll PIII 800s and HP PIII 5-600's. It's not all good, it's not all bad.

 

[Scrapster]

Yeah, I agree with ya about the high school connection. Usually it took the computers 5 min to boot. 5 min to load browser. And 5 min to access any web sites. So checking your email takes up 60% of your lunch break. Community college was better. The bandwidth increased alot, but we only had maybe two computer labs on campus. Now that I'm at the university their are computers everywhere w/ luxurious connections.

Just wait man. You have fat internet connections to look forward to in the future.



Scrapster

 

[hpkeeper]

hehe, yeah, that's one of the things I check when I go on my college visits, I check to see if their campus is more Mac or PC based and those computers that are connected to the internet, I check the bandwidth of them... bet not many people check that when they "College shop"

 

[Gatsby]

I remember High school.. the school computer lab was filled with Mac Performas for our Pascal Programming class..

Of course I was on a 486 sx2/50 at that time.. so it was not that big of a deal.

Gatsby - 56

 

[bigbootydaddy]

yeah high school i attended = mac = sux

yet they ran photoshop nice, just the hardware (tablets, scanners, etc) didnt like each other, constant crashes, memory probs...

guess cant blame the macs, but its the first thing you react to, i mean i have an old performa, its still useful...





























...at making my p3 p933 look really really REALLY bad-A

 

[Imported]

Really sucks.. PII-350s here, which we can't even OC. :|

 

[AmdEmAll]

My school got all new Comcraps with celerys. They restart on themselves and they like to freeze a lot.

 

[dude]

<< My school got all new Comcraps with celerys. They restart on themselves and they like to freeze a lot. >>



You mean, they aren't suppose to do that? Man, all this time I thought...

 

[ltk007]

My school isn't that bad, we have PII-450s with an AOpen BX board and 128mb ram running NT 4. Not bad, just nothing special.

 

[tomcat]

We have some decent computers at my HS.. lots pII 300's in the computer lab, in the library some 300s and one PIII. All run win2k. They are all also protected against insalling anything and running things from the hard drive.. but I get by with floppies and my ftp through internet explorer, also just figured out I could run remote administrator off one floppy!

 

[Supradude]

ha ha, go Cirekl, represet! ha ha, too bad we can't tweak'em, the whole lab of 800's are cc0's... = P

 

[Theslowone]

The college i attend upgrade their computers every two years. Half one year and the other half the next, so they never suck, but the intergrated video or the tnt 2 m64s sucks.

 

[Zenmervolt]

Keep in mind that the budgets from which High Schools operate are generally very tight. I was fortunate enought to attend a suburban school for which a levy had never been voted down. This meant that although we used Macs, they were almost always under 3 years old in the HS, and over this summer we (meaning those of us working as &quot;summer tecnicans&quot; [sic]) installed over 100 new computers, about 2/3 of which were G4-450 towers with half of those having 15-inch LCD monitors, the remainder were iMac DVs. I agree that boot time is terrible, but since most machines are required to run a wide variety of programs, the numerous &quot;extentions&quot; (just call them DLLs for crying out loud) that cause the slow boots are necessary. As for Bess, my HS used (and still uses) it as well. Bear in mind, however, that Bess or a similar program is required if the HS wishes to have the Government pay for the internet access, otherwise the money must come out of the operating budget. The high point of Bess was when I was researching a topic on world government for my Honors Government class and Bess prohibited access to the British Embassy's website, though I did E-mail the people at Bess and got the site unblocked. As for bandwidth, sort of a problem even though we had a T1, useage (sp?) was around 80% so it did slow down on a regular basis. Shared computers will always be less reliable than individual machines which can be taken care of properly. HS computers take quite a beating at the hands of the &quot;computer illiterate&quot;, more often than not the cause of a HS computer's crash was attributable to something stupid done by the previous user.

Zenmervolt

 

[Deeko]

We just got some new iPaq's, they're celerons of some sort. They aren't TOO bad, better than the 486's we had before. And we have that stupid Bess filtering too, yuck.

 

[Valhalla1]

oh my god, the pcs in my college's labs are pitiful. the hardware is at least almost decent, (P2 400's, 128mb ram). but they are running windows 98, and they have TONS of software installed on them, plus students put crap on them like AIM and yahoo pager, icq, etc. and other crap. they are the most unstable things I've ever seen in my life.

 

[Riskhk]

yeah college comps is suck...most of the ones on campus are imacs or if your lucky a g3...in the computer lab stuck with crappy ass dell p3 500

 

[InTheClouds]

If you search around a bit on the web you can find ways to get around Bess. Not that hard really.

 

[DaveJ]

We have pretty good stuff here at TCU... our minimum spec for networked machines last summer was a P200MMX or better, and there aren't too many of those. Most machines are P2-266 or better, and we installed close to 600 P3-600's this summer. Next year's minimum spec is a P2-350. All of our machines (with a few exceptions) are Compaq Deskpro's, and they're exceptionally reliable. I should know, I've got five of them in my office right now...

Dave

 

[Wedesdo]

hehehe... our labs are all p3 550's, the library has 8 dell 650s, and the rest are p2 450's.

they do have a proxy server, but it's NOT filtered.

I managed to install mIrc on one of them before the librarian found out

 

[Linh]

my school is full of dell p450's with 19&quot; monitors, so i'm not complaining.

 

[pac1085]

Mines not too bad I suppose. They used to be all macs, but now there all P3 systems built by a local computer company. The computers in the art rooms have P3 500s with alot of ram, and all of the other computer are basicly P3 500s, 64MB Ram on some Intel BX motherboard...4 or 8MB ATI Graphics, 32x CD-Rom, and an Internal 100Mb Zip in EVERY computer. 17&quot; AOC monitors with built in speakers, and just your standard keyboard and mouse. Oh yeah, 4.3 gig hard drives.

 

[chansen]

I'm going to date myself here compared to you guys, but when my university got internet access in the labs in my last year (1996), they were trying to run Windows 3.1 on 486DX33 machines. Utterly hopeless. Deadlines passed while you were waiting for WordPerfect to load.

 

[ManSnake]

I am here at my computer science department's lab, here the computers are all Dell PIII 600 with 21&quot; FD Trinitron monitors, they are sweet, sweet I tell ya!

 

[Bakwetu]

They will suck less if you assimilate them all for the TeAm (with the admins permission of course, there is no getting around that)