Posts tagged Hardware

Recently had an email which asked some good questions thought I might reply here as well for everyones benefit.

To answer your Questions

What are you using as the laptops? – full size, or netbooks? How many do you have, and what size school?

We are using a fifty/fifty mix of mac/pc all fullsize we have 120 at the moment and growing to 200 by next year. They are all full size right through to some 17inch machines. We also have 5 computer suites plus a further 7 in each year 7/8 room for 945 students. The machines are second hand, Two year old from Equico which we budget on $700 per unit with a new battery but to be honest with the price of laptops this has come down to a stage where we can almost buy new.

I presume you have sufficient wireless coverage in the school to allow them to be used anywhere?

We have full wireless coverage using Cisco access points. These are not centrally managed due to cost but are $900 per unit and we have 14 of them which gives us pretty good coverage. 70+ machines can run comfortably off each.

What sort of damage rate is there? – do you have to limit which students can borrow them? What process is in place for keeping them running.

The only damage in the past year and a half was when the technician dropped one. We get nervous on rainy days when students use them as umbrellas. Any student can borrow them seniors at anytime of day juniors require a teacher booking. The pc’s authenticate with active directory so are reasonably locked down to basic apps (word,firefox etc) the macs are a very open user which allows saving to local machine etc to enable multimedia usage without any hassles. We simply re-image these machines when we have a problem, which has been once this year for three machines. We really have a high trust model here and the students understand the value of the equipment, to be honest we get more damage in the rooms where the students are not responsible for the machines. Basically the process is: students come to Library after teacher has booked laptops on KAMAR and then student ID card and laptop are scanned and they take them away to class returning at the end of the period.

Any other fishhooks?

Someone to hand them out, you get a very sore arm lifting 200+ laptops an hour. Ongoing cost of maintaining them (which we have the same person doing).

Please if you wish to find out more contact us, we are only to happy to share how we have done things.