My phone is dumb. I had one bar on a sub-3G connection. I turn on and off airplane mode without moving from my seat. Now I have 4 bars on a 3G connection. I guess that's what happens when I go to a school built out of cinder blocks.
Today I learned my school doesn't block regedit. Should I tell them? The administrators seem to have it out for me, last year I was suspended for 3 days for wearing a damn coat.
Oh, good, both of my Xbox controllers have decided that they're going to quit working with Windows. And my rig is randomly shutting down for no reason. It's... Just... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHDFEPOWGFHGHIJGETRGPERH9GUERHGHEGPEHGPENGEAGHERPIENKGBHN9G
My school is supposed to have a very good technology department and also doesn't. Hence why the program they made us all install to monitor us somehow won't run.
So, my school installed SSDs in some of the desktop PCs. These computers have Core 2 Duo E4300's (1.8 GHz, they really suck) and 2GB of RAM. And they're used for programming and building projects with Visual Studio, as well as some 3d modeling (3ds max). And they decided an SSD was more important than, say, enough RAM to run VS and Chrome at once, or a CPU that can do 3d renders in less than a day. As if that wasn't cringe worthy enough, they decided they didn't want anyone stealing the SSDs (probably because they're the only thing in those PCs that's worth a shit). Their solution? They RIVETED the bloody side panels. Yup. Rivets. On the side fucking panels. Now two computers have had RAM failures, and they can't fix them because they're pretty much sealed. And it gets worse. Several of these computers are missing the optical and floppy drive covers, since they were broken by students screwing around with them. It's extremely easy to stick a hand in and unplug and grab the SSD (in fact, I think someone already stole it from one of the malfunctioning computers). Which, by the way, also makes it extremely easy to stick a hand in and kill a RAM stick, but that's another story.
Sounds exactly like my high school, right down to the specs and missing panels. They tried to install Minecraft a while after I left "for learning" and it wouldn't even boot. The SSD's in those computers are probably worth more than they are.
My school just uses some HP laptops that are locked inside metal cabined. All of them are in great condition tho except some of them are missing Microsoft Office for some reason.
Wearing a coat at lunch, get called to the office, administrators say it violates the dress code (that allows swastikas, mind you) and I got suspended for 3 days. Best part is the suspension was during a real bad part of winter so all 3 days were snow-outs We have the same ones, except ours are missing keys and have major network issues.
I remember back in high school, kids would remove the small rubber belt that actuates the disk drive's ejection mechanism, so that the drive would infinitely spin the motor to try and reel in the disk tray and the sensor would never report the disk tray being closed. Thus, as long as the computer was on, the motor was spinning at max rpm. The IT techs were incompetent at best and just explained that the fans needed to be oiled, and so the computer lab was absolutely deafening with 45 computers with noisy fans already, now each producing a roar from the disk drive. Then, the kids took it further and started messing around with the floppy drives. There was this one kid who could bend paperclips in such a way that it shorted the enable stepper motor pin on the back of the floppy. At that time, the computers got a sort-of upgrade with each getting another CD drive, which were quickly robbed of their actuating belts. At the end of the year it was comically loud. 45 computers, each with 2 fans clogged with dust, 2 CD drives trying to reel in the CD tray, and a floppy drive that is buzzing back and forth. They ended up never doing anything about it and last I knew it's still crazy loud in there, years later.
To be fair it was a nerdy school and the computers were junk (Pentium III in this day and age?). Teachers were rather lenient and these are edgy teens.
In my high school people just rammed paper into the quite open front panel fan slots on the Dell 945's to make them louder Meanwhile the Dell (Alienware) computers in my college are also loud as hell because all of their PSU's have or are failing for no reason running the fan at 100% from boot. Their buttons are also all broken and have fallen into the hole they cover :| Updated: Huh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thebacon Best name ever..
My school has some laptops too, they're pretty decent, Ivy Bridge i5 and SSDs. Ruined by the school's bloated Windows install though. Nothing like that here, but apparently there is SSD theft. IT isn't incompetent, manglement however is both incompetent and cheap which is why we're still running on 8 year old hardware. Meanwhile they have desktop PC's with i5's and 8 gigs of RAM. For email and microsoft office.
My school has a mix.The lowest computer labs run C2D with 4GB RAM and old 256MB GPUs. They're all run off a VM network that is run off of at least 6 rackmount servers, very new, at least xeon v3. The slightly better ones have 2nd gen i3s. The library and dedicated computer labs get Intel NUCs with atoms and 4GB RAM. The administrators for the most part get newer i3s and GTX 750s. The art labs all have brand new i7 21.5" 4k iMacs with 500GB SSDs. Computer science labs get brand new i7s and 390x's. It's pretty great unless you get stuck in a crappy lab.
390x's? Awesome. Highest end computer lab here is 7 year old, dual core Xeon CPUs, with 10 gigs of RAM and Quadro FX3800 GPUs (good, but old), which I had some fun overclocking in MSI afterburner. Pretty sure they're all due replacement in the next year or two, especially the Xeon/Quadro workstations. They're pretty much falling apart, most don't even have a front panel. The crappy HP's in the other labs are all dying, either from bad RAM or dead motherboards.
Someone decided it would be a good idea to leave the A/C off (and the computers running, probably) through the summer a couple year before I started high school. Apparently all the monitors died (what?). So, instead of replacing monitors, we got a shit ton of Dells. With the worst keyboards in the world. And all sorts of shitty optical and laser (yes, laser. Thanks Dell) mice.
Some of the Elite 8000s (Small desktops) are still around with C2D E7500s. Exact same model as the one I have. No relation. *Whistles* Most of the small desktops now are HP Elite whatevers with (4th gen?) i5s and widescreen monitors rather than 4:3s. Then the only computers I actually have to use anymore are the classroom of workstations with pretty good (2nd gen?) i5s and Quadros with 1080p screens. Good enough for Minecraft, Unturned, Minesweeper, etc. All the kids have Chromebooks (Dell Chromebook 11s) which are crappy. Some of the kids put Linux on them but I don't even use mine. I just bring my E4310. The desktops don't get used that often anymore, but the older ones before the Chromebooks got abused. The belts were taken out of the CD drives, stuff stuffed in, (Once I found a muffin. Another time I found a wrecked Palm Pre.) pencil marks on the screens, etc. I always hated having to use the HP laptop cart because they always had the keyboard pointer taken off (Which I preferred over the crappy touchpad) and had god awful performance/connection to the server. (First gen i5 540m with Intel GPU.) A lot of them didn't even have the screen set to the right resolution which you couldn't change.
I'm not allowed to bring/use a laptop. So when I need to do work on a computer, I am forced to use the school computers. Most of which have i3's with 8GB RAM. The "workstations" if you can call them that, are either i5-4460 with Radeon 8700-series (for Sci Vis (3d modeling and photoshop stuff)) or i7-4771 with FirePros (CAD).
