Over the summer we brought in 40 laptops to check out to students. They were tested with WindowsXP but immediately moved to Vista to support the campus effort to migrate. The good news was that Vista enabled us to map the student network drive and print reliably. The bad news was that Vista is much, much slower to boot and log in. The image for these computers was pretty well streamlined thanks to a lot of hard work from our C-Tech Nick so we decided the best option was to increase RAM from 1GB to 2GB. After discovering a very good deal on memory prices, we actually jumped to 3GB. This dramatically reduced the boot time but it is still very slow compared to XP. In he mean time, laptop popularity has really spiked and we may have 30+ laptops checked out during our peak periods. It is at these times that we run into trouble and students have difficulty logging on. Right now, Nick is working on an XP image that will preserve students' ability to access their drive and print but it is not likely to be as seemless as the Vista image. Another concern is ITS' reluctance to allow Office 2007 on an XP machine. This may require us to put Office 2003 on the laptops further increasing the disparity between the laptops and desktops at the library.
Clearly there is no easy solution. Of course we could hope that Windows 7 is released this summer and that is packs the functionality of Vista with the performance of XP but I'm not holding my breath. I have said a few times in the past that Vista was a victim of exagerrated media and that it isn't as bad as you hear (yes, it's slow). I still believe that statement to be true, but I also believe that Windows 7 is experiencing the same kind of hype in the opposite direction. I doubt very much that it will be as good as the current buzz is making it out to be but we can always hope. I'll post more as the laptop situation evolves.
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