BELOW:
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Hello, all--
This is Richard Phung, the Labs & Classrooms Coordinator with University Technology.
I have just been forwarded a rather discerning message about the perceived state of the Laptop Cart.
I am terribly sorry for the troubles that you have experienced in your class due to apparent hardware and/or software failures associated with this particular classroom technology.
You have been attached to this email because our records indicate that you often employ the use of the laptop cart for your courses.
I am the primary person responsible for assuring that the Laptop Cart workstations are equipped with the software necessary for your courses and that the desktop configurations allow the machines to function at their fullest potential. Looking forward, I would like to propose that together, we re-examine your individual curricular objectives to determine whether the Laptop Cart is suitable for your needs. I would also propose that you as faculty reserve time with me well in advance to your course start dates to examine the hardware and software configurations for what you consider "acceptable" operation and prepare contingencies accordingly.
We have computer classrooms with exceptional desktop hardware and software that should be considered first and foremost for classes where computers comprise 30% or more of your classroom activities. Entire courses built around the use of the laptop cart should be strongly discouraged as this reserve item has been on a first-come, first-serve basis for its life time. This may leave your class at a disadvantage when it is unavailable to you.
The message below is an attempt to address some key issues that you or others may be having with the workstations and some of the methods we are taking to remedy these problems.
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--- They are old. ---
These machines are Compaq nc6400 workstations. The NC6400 was originally launched in 2006, and contains the following hardware:
Intel® Centrino® Duo processor technology
• Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T5600
• 1.83 GHz , 2 MB L2 cache, 667 MHz FSB
Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Details can be found here:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ca/en/sm/WF06b/12139188-12139280-12139280-12139280-12434660-12401288-77983407.html
As they are reaching their 5-year operational lives, we have run into some complications when considering their replacement. One issue is that these machines were originally obtained by a grant. Their upgrades and maintenance are provided by our department. Replacing these units (~estimated $20k for hardware alone) will have a significant fiscal impact outside of our normal upgrade expenses.
I will work with my supervisor, Charles Cooper, to devise an appropriate solution and proposed timeline for replacement.
More technical details about these machines' computing power is presented below:
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--- They have really slow network access:
I have forwarded a message to networking about latency issues, but we have been unable to replicate any connectivity issues. It may be beneficial to record where and when connection problems arise so that we can better troubleshoot these slow network access problems.
The machines have a built-in wireless G and gigabit ethernet card(s):
Wireless Technologies
Intel® Wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g MOW1 mini-pci card, Bluetooth
Network interface
Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit (10/100/1000 NIC) PCI Express Ethernet Controller
Their hardware suggests that they would have no problems accessing the network(s) at Lesley. When my assistants test network connectivity within the classrooms, they will often utilize one of these machines.
Using standard benchmarking tools (e.g. speedtest.net), I am able to achieve download/upload speeds of 2.9Mb/s and 4.83Mb/s, respectively, from the wireless network. *See attachment (speedtest.jpg)
Further investigating, we have conducted rigorous ping-tests to local network resources (e.g. workstation-to-print server(s), workstation-to-workstation via wireless/wired, workstation-to-AIB & Brattle), and have found speeds within campus to be consistent with 100/1000Mb ethernet.
*See attachment (networkandmemorytest.jpg)
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--- They do not have enough Random Access Memory (RAM).
Although these machines originally came with 1GB of RAM, we recently (August 2010) upgraded their memory with a full 4GB of memory (the maximum that they can hold).
Using the latest benchmark tools (PCMark05), we had determined that the Read/Write speeds for a 16MB data packet on this memory is about 4069MB/s and 2800Mb/s, respectively.
The same benchmark tool ran on the latest MacBookPro with 2GB of RAM from our circulation which yielded 5809MB/s (read); 5282MB/s (write)
This test is an example of how "more" does not equate to "better/faster."
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--- Loading a simple Word document takes up to 5 minutes---
We have had reports of Word Documents taking a long time to load or crashing the machines altogether. Our current installation is Microsoft Office 2007 with the Compatibility Pack (version 12.0.6425).
*See attached (officeversion.jpg)
Testing our current version Our test process involved opening documents created with Office 2003 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), Office 2008 (for mac), and Office 2010. We have also tried opening a battery of XML-standard doctypes from OpenOffice, office templates (*.dotx, *.dotm, *.potx, etc), and documents with advanced mail-merge fields. Everything seemed to work fine for us, despite the complexity of the document. You would think that testing this issue would uncover problems with files of various formats created with different versions of the Microsoft Office Suite, but this is not consistent with our findings. This is not to say that there are no problems at all-- load-times vary dramatically, as to be expected with any computer.
We have discovered a few key updates to the software (which will be rolled-out for the Spring 2011), that may have prevented certain features to work correctly, but the only way to be sure our software configuration works for your files is to simply test your files on the machines. It may be to your benefit to update your course materials (re-saving or re-selecting their compatibility modes) to assure backwards compatibility with a multitude of machines. It is much easier to modify and redistribute a few documents than it would be to change an entire system configuration.
It is also possible that processing file-format changes is too intensive on the internal hardware. There is very little that I can modify (RAM included), that can resolve processing capabilities. This is simply a limitation of the machines.
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As far as the machines themselves go, they are not bad computing units.
Accessing the internet seems to be fairly normal, and launching non-intensive applications seems to be as expected.
Compared to other machines (namely Dual-Boot Intel iMacs and Dual-Boot MacBook Pros) on pure hardware performance, they are only marginally inferior.
Attached are the system profiles and rigorous benchmarks for both
*See attached (SystemProfiles.zip and Benchmarks.zip)
https://sites.google.com/site/lesleylabpublic/home/SystemProfiles.zip
https://sites.google.com/site/lesleylabpublic/home/Benchmarks.zip
Depending on your class activity, you may want to look for alternatives to the Laptop Cart.
As I had mentioned briefly before, utilizing our installed classroom technologies has many distinct advantages over the Laptop Cart. The Dual-Boot Intel iMac desktops are vastly superior to any mobile computing units we can provide at this time, and when these teaching spaces are reserved, it guarantees your students access to computing amenities.
The Spring 2011 Laptop Cart Image will be built from scratch and will model the MacBook Pro software configuration which includes Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (v 12.0.6425), and a variety of other productivity tools.
I will begin collecting data and configuring a machine for this area starting the week of November 22 and finishing the image creation process on December 13. If you would like to be a part of this process, I would strongly encourage that you make an appointment with me. In this time, we will be testing our software configuration with your file types.
Thank you for making it to the end of this dense technical documentation.
I appreciate your time, and I look forward to your feedback.
--Richard Phung
Classrooms & Labs Coordinator
University Technology - Lesley University
617.349.8819 | x8770
rphung@lesley.edu
via Outlook Web Access
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So there you have it.
