[graphiteman]

What kinds of problems do you have with PCs at school?

Last year at my school, we couldn't print half of the time. Some of the computers wouldn't boot up. And security was a joke. Actually, it still is. (Security: suspension for violating acceptable use agreement! That's how bad the security software is.)

[edit: spelling]

[ 10-21-2001: Message edited by: graphiteman ]

[fulmer]

Viruses, and lots of them. Some computers wouldn't even boot up, and the kids would swap floppies, thus spreading the infection everywhere.

[sek929]

My old high school used all Macs and I don't use the PCs at my college....so I really don't have any horror stories. I just stear clear of all the bullsh*t, I don't have time to wait for things to work. Thats why I use Macs. I sit down, get my **** done, and get on with life

[alphamatrix]

I don't know, I seem to manage to crash the new PIII Dells runnin 2000 pro, its sorta fun. If the comps are runnin 2000 pro and the security "features" are activated you can get around, and do things like browes C: drive if you open up PowerPoint and types some random text or add a image and right click it select the action deal and set it to open a app, click "Browse" and now you should be able to move around C: drive a little bit.

If the school knew all the stuff that I had done on their computers they definatly would not be letting me use them.

I uses anonimizer.com to get past the filters *ONLY* when i know where I'm going.

[TheJoshu]

No real security in the computer labs (all Macs, though) at the private school I went to from 1st to 8th grades. I had a friend who used to love to experiment (harmlessly) with the machines, and to an extent I played with this too. Some of the administration frowned upon what we were doing, but the teachers in charge of the labs enjoyed watching us and stuck up for us when the administration wanted us to stop. We didn't do any damage, and basically helped them troubleshoot their systems. Ah, the memories. My public high school has only PCs - except: about a week after I came to the school, back in the fall of 1999, I saw a pile of Power Mac G4s sitting in the lobby. I was lamenting the lack of Macs at the school, and really wanted to take whatever class would be attached to these G4s (the first, I think, I had seen in person). Two years later, I'm taking color photography - and what do I see again? The G4s! Now two years old, sitting in the photo lab being used for the digital photography class. I finally got to use them - very pleasing.

OK, I know that wasn't relevant. But still.

[IUJHJSDHE]

My pc only school (Before I went to a mac only one, lucky me!) Had many problems.

One computer would not shutdown. You would click shut down and it would not, It would close windows and then restart not shut down. LOL!!!!

One's cd drive had to be replaced.

The rest just crashed a lot.

One of them a cool program on it (A bit like imovie only for animation) But it was banned after some kid mad a porn video useing it, LOLLOL!!!

I remember the teacher saying "What I do not understand is why no one told me about this sooner" LOL


LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!

HAHHAHHAHHAHHAHAHA!!!

[agentz]

As I've said elsewhere I work for the government agency that looks after school computers in this area....

Lets see what problems some of our machines suffer from on a regular basis.....

� iMacs with stuffed CD rom drives
� iMacs with dead analog/psu/mobos (leading to GLOD)
� iMacs with defective internal video cables causing the screen to flicker
� iMacs with dead HDs
� iMacs with totally trashed operating systems

� Dell Optiplexes with stuffed CD rom drives
� Optis with dead PSU/mobos
� Optis with stuffed IDE controllers
� Optis with completely dead HDs
� Optis with viruses to hell and back

I know it sounds a lot, but when you consider we have something like 6,000 systems in 80ish sites, its not too bad.

I reckon that on a month by month basis, we maybe have about 15-20 of each platform with genuine hardware failures. Again, I reckon that we suffer from a reasonably equal number of operating system failures per platform per month. The rest of the majority of our work tends to be generated by user error and by managing user expectations. Last month we cleared something like 650 jobs through our call handling system. Subtract maybe 200 jobs for email account admin, subtract 100 for MIS problems, and subtract another 50 or so for Telco problems and you get a rough number of genuine service calls.

I think we are a lot better off than a lot of other Scottish local authorities in that we have a fairly well established Technical Support Group so nothing remains bust for more than a couple of days.

[ 10-21-2001: Message edited by: agentz ]

[cheerios]

ah, the wonders of the CAD Lab here at school... I think the engineering dept is the only PC only lab on campus. Every other one has macs and/or Solaris included, or exclusively. Ah, but we MUST know AutoCAD. And VPC is too obvious, so we languish away, using NT4, which is set to log us out after 5 minutes of idle time... this is great, by the way, when you stop your drawing to listen to the teacher, look down,adn the last hour of works just been lost as your comp logs out on you. Not to mention hte fact the machines are running on 128 Megs of RAM. Oye, I could slap whoever admin's that lab upside the head for all the stupid stuff they do. Only perk is the 17" monitors... Machines just STOP working, occasionally... I have yet to see a cause for this, but it happens frequently...

[Macintosh]

Don't get me started. My school is doing s decent job of implementing macs and pc's, but in the wrong ways. I guess that is a major problem at most scools. I mean you could ave the best hardware from Apple and Dell and use the Macs for word processing and Dell's for photoshop, right? Well, thats what my school pretty much does. The only exclusive mac class is in photoography classes, thay use G3 an G4s (not enough). Get this, we use PC's and Adobe Premier for video editing classes. LOL!

I am done getting mad about the situation because in a few years the schools will buy macs becuase everybody else will be too.

I was kind of pissed that this girl in 9th grade got a new ibook because she has arthritis. I guess it is good they got one for her but they should do this for all kids who want a mac. It would be nice if my school had a better mac presence. Oh well, I am the mac presence!

[jarinteractive]

All of the PC's crash! But, my trusty PowerBook works!!!

-JARinteractive

[Nimisys]

in the lab of PC i was ruuning we had one mobo's BIOS scrammbled with the CIH virus before i mangaed to track down who was spreading it(some kiddie who donwloaded norton anti-virus off a warez ftp, WITHOUT scanning it, and decied to install it on my machines ) had one harddrive in one of the older machines fail, about a dozen dead floppys drives (they were screwy from the mfg). software wasnt a problem as all there CAD stuff was stored on a file server and not the local machine, so i would just ghost the machines every month or so, and made sure i kept the drivers upto date.

most of my problems came form the users who knew just enough about windows to cause some problems... though that changed when i got win2k on the machines to lock them down properly

[DyslexicCow]

Last year, My school got a shipment of 50 new dells for the computer art rooms. Within the next week all 50 of them had to be sent back because either the harddrive was bad or a NIC died. Everytime the dell techs would show up at my school I would laugh and say how much their computers suck. I don't think they liked me too much.

[ 10-22-2001: Message edited by: DyslexicCow ]

[sek929]

They probably just though that you were a childish fool.

And Nimisys, I hear your story. All my friends know just enough so they can screw with **** and then call me to come fix it. I wouldn't mind if they learned after a while but je-sus!

Same deal with the Mac lab at my ols high school. Kids knew enough to screw the hell out of all the poor imac but never knew how to fix them. Until I introduced the head admin to OS9 and multiple users

[DyslexicCow]

Originally posted by sek929:
<STRONG>They probably just though that you were a childish fool.
</STRONG>

Or that....but I just think they didn't like me. I gave valid reasons why their computers sucked.