Friday, December 5, 2008

Updating the Library Computers

Our first major technology orders of the year arrived yesterday. It was the largest memory order I have ever seen. 264 sticks of memory totaling 528 GB of RAM are now ready to go into our students computers. Nick and I spent most of the afternoon yesterday upgrading the student laptops from 1GB of RAM to 3GB. We did some preliminary testing a while back and discovered that boot times could be reduced dramatically with the addition of more RAM. On an interesting side note, all twenty of the currently active laptops were checked out yesterday afternoon with students waiting for more as we made them available. I would say that 25-30 were checked out at once late Thursday. So it took a while for the laptops to catch on but they now appear to be very popular. I suspect that all forty will be in use quite often next semester.

Aside from doing memory upgrades to the laptops, we will add more RAM to all of the student computers in the West Commons, Reference, and Periodicals. We will also bring most of the computers in 2102A&B up to 3GB as well. Some of you may be wondering why we are jumping all the way to 3GB. To put it simply, the price difference between a single 1GB module and a 2GB module was so small that we felt it was worth the little extra money. For example, it was only about $10 more per laptop to go to 3GB vs. 2GB.

Next week, Nick and I are going to perform some more tests to show the impact the extra memory has on boot and log-in times. I'll post them here for those interested.