Laptops Required for Freshmen

An anonymous reader writes "Indiana State University will become the first public university in the state to require all students to have notebook computers, beginning with incoming freshmen in fall 2007. Guess which laptop is the preferred one..." I started bringing laptops to class around my Junior year. I'm unconvinced that they helped me with my grades.

That's not good.

[Kadin2048]

Something's messed up with your system. That's not how it works; the auto-switching features of OS X are quite "smart" in my experience (assuming you have it set up to join any available network when no preferred ones are connected). I think the default is to prompt the user when connecting to a non-whitelisted, unencrypted network, however.

That said, my corporate laptop doesn't do a horrible job of WLAN management either, although I use a 3rd party program rather than the built-in Windows tools to manage different connection profiles (it also turns the VPN on if I'm not on the corporate subnet).

Re:helps mobile users automatically?

[DogDude]

Because you think Thinkpads are cheap? What world do you live in?

Cheapest Thinkpad: $750 [ibm.com]
Cheapest Powerbook: $1750 [apple.com]

That's $1000. Go away.

Generally not the case....

[smaerd]

I attend school at MSOE [msoe.edu] Where Laptops are not just required, you have to lease the damn things from the school (they're HP/Compaq laptops). There IS a decent amount of theft, but generally it's one of two things

Either it's some random person from the neighborhood (not a student) who wanders into a school building, finds a laptop someone left ungaurded, yoinks it, and then runs (with no time to turn the laptop off, let alone the wireless).

Or, it's students who need their laptops repaired. The tech-support guys tend to need your laptop for a week or two for even the simplest repairs, so students tend to wait until between quarters (think short semesters, with pathetically small breaks in between them, oh and there's three of them, not four) to turn in their laptop for repair. What happens? The student's grades come back during the break and the results are bad. They have to leave the school. So this angry, bitter, ex-student now is SUPPOSED to return the LOANER laptop they got when they turned in their regular laptop. Instead, a lot (apparently) simply keep the loaner whilst giving the school a one-finger salute.

I wouldn't really care about the theivery (especially the first kind, as I only leave my laptop alone in LOCKED labs with security cameras pointing at it.. and I back-up my stuff :) ). But the power-supply pin on my laptop FELL OFF recently and so I took the beast in to get repaired (we're currently on break week). The laptop the school makes me lease is a HP Compaq nw8240. The loaner they gave me is a HP Compaq nw8000. I wouldn't really care about getting an older laptop (even if I hadn't gotten used to the wide-screen laptop), but they GIMP the loaners now because of the theiving! The wireless NICs don't work. You can't put the suckers in higher than 1024x768 resolution, and apparently other things... (I haven't used it much as it's craptacular). I imagine these are all software things and I could just blow the image away and put Linux on it... I'm just too lazy to do that for a laptop I shouldn't have longer than about a week or two.

My point of this post is that Theiving of a students' laptops are almost always done by non-students (If you are a student, you've already got a laptop :) ). There's occasionally the guy that steals his buddy's laptop to sell on Ebay to score some [insert drug type here] or to pay for tuition, but this is very uncommon. As it is, with a population of about 2000 students (all with laptops), the rate of laptop theft if about 1/month. Bike thefts, OTOH, are around 3/month.

Re:helps mobile users automatically?

[good soldier svejk]

This sounds like a known bug in some versions of the Airport software. You can fix it by re-running the Network Setup Assistant. From the Terminal run, open /System/Library/CoreServices/Network\ Setup\ Assistant.app. Then recreate all your connections. For some reason simply removing and recreatng the connections in Internet Connect or System Preferrences does not fix it, but running the setup Asistant does. Probably deletes some preference file. I never really investigated the details.

A bit misleading ...

[resonantblue]

Yeah, it's the first state university in the state of Indiana, but it's definitely not the first.

I was a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 5 years ago and we were required to have laptops as well. And yes, UNC is also a state university.

Thinkpads were also the preferred laptops there b/c there was an arrangment made with IBM at the time. For students who couldn't afford it, it was available as part of their financial aid.