It's a compaq notebook from the school district that she works for. However, there is a horrible catch-- although she is expected to work with it, she can't modify it AT ALL because she doesn't actually own it-- it's merely issued. The district expects all staff to keeptheir notebooks configured exactly the same way, which kind of kills the usability. How can you actually use the computer if you're not allowed to install your own software? Sounds like a half-a**ed system to me. I would simply buy the notebook in that case so I could do what I wanted with it.

She can't change the settings on the hard drive, and that includes saving files. At work, she can save stuff to a virtual drive on the network (wonderful idea, it sure beats hell out of the idea of keeping files locally [/sarcasm]) When out of range of the school network, She has to use a floppy (which i would not trust with anything important) or a portable usb drive. The comp also has a CDrw drive, but the software is roxio, which really blows.

There is this stupid little card thing set in the side that allows wireless access to her school's network, but is utterly useless for interfacing with my home network, which means no internet access yet. Thank god the comp has an ethernet port, so I can run a cable to my router at least. The comp has virus protection, but under the do-not-change clause, i'm not sure that we can update it. And we can just forget about printing anything because I can't install printer drivers...

The facts:

The comp has an intel pentium 4 (not sure of exact speed yet.)

26 GB hard drive, most of which we can't actually use according to the contract.

The comp has win2k which isn't all that bad, but not all that good, either. I suggested making a restore point and then adding software after that, but then i figured out that win2k has no system restore feature like in winxp, so there is no way to quickly revert back.


anyone want to bet how long it will take for the copy of internet explorer to become hijacked since we can't install firefox?

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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited April 29, 2004).]

at least it's not like those free PCs companies gave away a while back... where a large chunk of your screen space was taken by ads


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LONG LIVE DREAMCAST!!!

Kind of a bum deal, but that's the way it works sometimes.

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I'm not an actor. I just play one on TV.

Have you not thought of instaling everything you want and then wiping the drive or uninstalling it all at the end of the year?

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Frogblast the Vent Core!

--End of Line--

There's stuff that's already on there though that he'd have to reinstall from that. They could just check the date of creation by clicking on properties as well. I'm sure if they're THAT anal already, they would check that sort of stuff.

A 26GB harddrive computer is nothin to get in a big deal about though.. Nowadays you can hardly save a jpeg for that.

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"We came, we saw, we conquered, we...woke up!"

Make a disk image, compress it, and store it on one of your larger hard drives.

Or just swap out the hard drive.

Why not "ghost" an image (Norton Ghost) as a save point of exactly the state of the present machine, create a boot-up disk and then, at the end of the contract, upload the image back onto the machine? Works a treat here at work, what with the amount of machines the kids beggar up

On the other hand - I can see why she can't install stuff --> we have a formal written policy with the staff laptops that staff *cannot* install new software on it: basically when they log-on (Win2K) they load a *very* strict user profile that doesn't let them have access permissions to anything other than one area of the HDD (a directory "C:\My Files"). Within this directory they have full control, but because the way the user profiles are set-up, they can't install programs or write to the registry.

"Why!?!" I hear you ask - well to put it bluntly:... they're idiots - even the IT literate members (and they're arguably the more "dangerous" group - "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"). The laptop setup is designed so that we, as system administrators, don't have to faff around wasting our time because of a stupid PEBKAK error . In short, give them full administrative rights, and you're just asking for trouble, so why not avoid the hassle altogether, and just limit what they can do?

I know which option I'd go for (and the one that we employ)!!!

Just my two pennies worth

-Jackpot

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"lucky_jackpot is the smily god..." - gothicX

"Life is mostly froth and bubble,
But two things stand in stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own"
("Ye Wearie Wayfarer" - by Adam Lindsay Gordon)

Teach them linux, and have them use a lesser account. Without access to the root account, they can't do any real damage, right?




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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Someone should inform the school district that they wasted a lot of money buying laptops whose potential will never be even halfway reached.

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Genesis 22:2-5 - And God said unto Abraham "You must kill your son, Isaac." And Abraham said "What? I can't hear you! You'll have to speak into the microphone." And God said "Check, check, check, check. Jerry, can you pull the high end out. I'm getting some hiss up here."
Valuable Life Lesson: Frog + Potato Gun = Blindness

Catalog of Electronic Components - Complete IC data sheets
National Electrical Code® (NEC®) Online - Legal requirements for wiring projects.

They can't do any damage with what he's doing either.

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http://www.sporkaudio.com

Because these are schoolteachers, and not necessarily the most computer-literate people; hence, training them to use Linux would be a very...difficult process.

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Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

-R.D. Laing

I disagree. Using Linux is really easy. Configuring it and installing different packages is where the difficulty lies. Does anyone still have that link to the article the guy wrote about his four-year-old granddaughter using Linux?



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Our very existence is at stake

Yeah, my aunt was here using one of my linux desktops. She got on, checked her mail, wrote up a shopping list, printed some stuff off, just stuff like that. She knows very little about computers, but she didn't even ask me once how to do what she needed.

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http://www.sporkaudio.com

But these are SCHOOL TEACHERS. It's not like they have loads of time on their hands to learn an entirely new OS.

I don't exactly buy the "4 year old grand-daughter" story as a good example of how easy it is to use. Young children are proven to catch onto things much faster than older people. Case in point. Say some parents have a deaf child. Everyone in the family needs to learn sign language. It's been proven that the child will learn it faster than the parents. The parents have to work a bit harder to get it. As for your grandmother, I obviously know nothing about the whole situation at all, but it seems to me that those are very simple things to do, and if your setup was at least vaguely similar to a normal Windows setup, she'd probably be able to find her way around without to much trouble.

My 2 cents again.

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Frogblast the Vent Core!

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