are the computers at your school/college/university/work any good?

[Guest]

At my HS, we have HP towers with i5 (don't know the model, but pre-Sandy Bridge), 4GB of RAM, Win7, and in the Graphic Design classroom, they have Nvidia GT 630s in them.

[Arty]

My High School has a lab of 30 computers with titans in them......and my district is also broke lmao.....

the rest of school computers are decade old running xp, all from HP

[Sauron]

I can't hate on my university, we get z200 workstations from dell with xeons, 8gb of ram and quadros not the best thing ever but they're pretty good for work (which is their main purpose after all ^^). In one lab we have i5 desktops (they also have quadros and 8gb of ram though) but they do the job all right too.

[ROK]

My school has some crapboxes running AMD APUs and there are carts of Hewlett Packard laptops. Some carts have HP Probooks running AMD A8-4500M APUs with 8GB of ram and 300GB HDDs which are far from decent, taking minutes from boot to the desktop with most others running AMD E1-1500s and 4GB of ram which are insanely slow. They also have a few rooms with new iMacs. I usually bring my macbook because the computers they give us are unbearable.

[ROK]

what.

the.

hell.

 

thats bloody rediculious.....

cant bring your own?!?!?!?!?!?!

you're better of using pen and paper. or changing school...

or do what i did. be homeschooled. ^~^

At my old school the situation was similar but they gave us refurbed Dell N5010s with 3GB of ram, Core i3 (220M iirc), 200gb HDDs for $800/school year for 3 years. The microsoft office they installed on my PC was also a pirated copy... lol

[BurgerBum]

At my old school the situation was similar but they gave us refurbed Dell N5010s with 3GB of ram, Core i3 (220M iirc), 200gb HDDs for $800/school year for 3 years. The office they installed on my PC was also a pirated copy... lol

i........ i...

i cant.

[mr moose]

define "good"  I work in a primary school and have done some IT consulting for secondary.  The best systems range from no computers at all in a classroom to $10,000 workstations for intense modeling/simulation work.

 

Given that in early education giving two classrooms computers costs the same as employing a full time teacher, and all the research shows the best academic outcomes from early education stem from more teacher contact hours, then for primary it could be argued that minimal IT is best for development, however the reverse is true by the time you get to secondary school,  and it's only in senior secondary and tertiary that specific computers systems are required.

[clarkmcc]

I work at a computer shop and we have some sick builds in there. i7s. Watercooled. SLI.

[clarkmcc]

define "good"  I work in a primary school and have done some IT consulting for secondary.  The best systems range from no computers at all in a classroom to $10,000 workstations for intense modeling/simulation work.

 

Given that in early education giving two classrooms computers costs the same as employing a full time teacher, and all the research shows the best academic outcomes from early education stem from more teacher contact hours, then for primary it could be argued that minimal IT is best for development, however the reverse is true by the time you get to secondary school,  and it's only in senior secondary and tertiary that specific computers systems are required.

 

My dad has an $8000 workstation which after looking at the specs, I could build for $1500 

[Swndlr]

most of the comps at my hs are imacs, then theres me with my blade lmao. then again some classes like the commercial art / gfx studio rooms have some pretty beefy hardware, but then again theyre used much more heavily during the day for rendering and editing and whatnot.

[mr moose]

My dad has an $8000 workstation which after looking at the specs, I could build for $1500 

 

In most cases there is a reason why workstations cost significantly more.  Whilst you can use an i7 instead of a xeon, a domestic gpu instead of firepro or quadro and standard ram in stead of ECC etc, the result will not always be the same. Especially if you are running a simulation that takes three days and you can't afford the time for it to baulk right at the end because your GPU is thermally throttling.

[Robi_g]

yes

[MoDtEc]

A couple of friends and i build the IT infrastructure at our scholl literally. I left school one year ako but two of us are still working on it in their spare time (students..... <_< )

 

thin clients with aftermarket ssds installed by us, powered by four terminal servers from dell (2x Dual 8core Xeon with 64 gb of RAM, 2x 6core Xeon with 32 gb RAM ... dont remember the actual cpus though)

 

network is build: thin clients -> gigabit ethernet -> HUUUGE switches -> fibre optic cables (quite expensive stuff there) -> servers

 

outlook servers of course (dont remember specs)

 

home page and intranet server (dont remember specs)

 

four mac pros for video editing projekts (had a hard fight with the principal getting them, but one of our best art techers wanted em reeeaally bad)

 

yea and of course some backup stuff and freenas servers and about 4 or 5 ups i think

 

oh and free and fast wifi in the whole building most of the time

 

everything works quite decent there but if there was/is ONE issue a month wee/them(two guys i mentioned) culdnt fix in seconds everyone was complaining like hell (usual IT guys at companies have the same problem tough)

to sum it up: its one of the best equipped non-private-schools when it comes to IT systems in lower saxony, because five nerds said: because we can

[IrkenWarrior]

the computers at my high school ran better than the ones at the college i went to (while i could pay). probably because we weren't allowed to do *anything* to them and the few of us who did more or less knew what we were doing. the ones at the college and super slow and almost always have a virus or some bullshit. it's super easy to guess the passwords and screw everything up. the computers themselves are pretty good. the issue is the people using the computers.

[jackRCwaters]

Programming/Computing Pc's at napier university have dual monitor systems with 16GB of ram so overall can't complain

[carolkarine]

My unis engineering department has I5 2500's. They're not that bad. I just wish that they would use SSDs.

[ologiic]

Computer at work is a Dell Vostro Laptop 4GB ram, 120gb SSD and an i3. (Helpdesk Support for Liberty Healthcare)

 

Specs aren't all that great but it's pretty quick with the SSD.

[Crossfire100]

My school has really bad computers on a really slow server!! Painful.

[BrianPena]

My school has a developer section where they have a bunch of line up of Alienwares. I don't know the specs exactly though, or care enough to actually go there and check.

[Tonka_Truck]

The pcs at my school have core 2 duos and two gigs of RAM (some have 4 gigs)

 

But i remember seeing a pc that had a single core celeron and 512mb of RAM.

[JefferyD90]

I don't see how people are calling "i5/i3's with 4GB+ of RAM" bad work machines?  This is about as good as you will see in a business environment.  Not only that its not like you can really get any better.

 

Oh so its a i5-2600?  That's only like 2 generations "old", and there aren't hardly any programs that require anything more.

 

On the server and networking side, I will go as far to say most business have awful "bandaid" networks.  But its totally common.

 

At my place of business our Kiosk are usually ~1.5Ghz single core CPU's with 1GB of RAM, no local storage, using a custom version of Linux.  Hand held computers are using Windows CE with probably a 1Ghz ARM CPU with (guessing) half a gig of memory.  All our normal machines are for managers only and are IBM thinkpads.

[feynm4n]

My uni just upgraded all the physics department pc's to dual monitor set ups using mid range i5s internal graphics. This was after many students requested dual monitor set ups to increase productivity.

 

In general this change has been very well received, with most people preferring it to having with one display faster pcs.

[cox1000]

dell optiplex 745, 256mb RAM, XP. While a school not far from mine has spent money on getting all students iPads. How they have done this I'll never know.

[asim1999]

how could they afford ipads when they have good-for-nothing desktops? doesnt make sense

[Cad6500]

my high school had ivy bridge i7s (yes i7s for basics of IT and stuff) with 8GB of ram.. good? yes... over-the-top? yes... but I was in 4th year, and it was pretty late into the school year that those computer labs opened up. before that it was either core2duo's with 3GBs of ram, so still good or we could end up in the labs with really old hardware, like old P4s that have been there since I was in 2nd or 3rd grade (9 years maybe, since it was still K10 back then)... so it varies, some labs are great, some are good, and others are bad/outdated.