Over the summer we purchased 40 laptops to check out to students. We installed Vista on the laptops and the performance has been a little disappointing (read:slow). Recently we decided to see what a memory upgrade would do for them. We pulled the memory from half of the computers and added it to the other half to bring the total to 2GB. The results were very positive especially in the realm of boot times where we shaved a full minute off the start-up times. We've left one half upgraded and the other half awaiting new RAM but demand for laptops is up and nearly all of the 20 working laptops are being checked out. Fortunately our FCLA money has come in early and I hope to get the rest of the computers working within a couple of weeks. When it is all said and done, we will have 3GB of RAM in each laptop. I'll
One side effect of the slowly growing popularity is the demand on the wireless network. During one of my recent walk-throughs I counted over 100 laptops in use by students and almost none of them belonged to the library. Fortunately ITS is currently beefing up our wireless network by adding six additional access points. This should enable us to handle of demands of all of our laptop using patrons for quite a while.
In addition to memory upgrades and added access points, we're going to go back and take a look at the image on these laptops and see if we can tweak anything to improve overall performance. This should happen during the break in December.
