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.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Laptop Checkout at UNF 1.0
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Cloud Computing
While trying to look ahead and see what is coming next, I keep running into a term that I am not sure everyone understands. That term is "Cloud Computing" and I think we are going to be hearing that term more and more.
In order to understand Cloud Computing, let's set the framework for the current model of computing. Think about the way you typically work today. You sit down to your computer, open a file in your documents folder with an application installed on said computer and create a piece of work. If you want to do something different, you open another application on your computer or install another application on your computer to give you more capability. Eventually your computer runs out of memory, storage, processing power or whatever and needs to be replaced with a new more powerful system.
Cloud Computing is different. It refers to the use of multiple networked computers (the cloud) as the primary resource for the computing tasks. That could mean that the software, storage and processing resides on some computers other than your own. Perhaps the most commonly recognizable example of this is our own campus webmail. By using your browser, you access your email but all of the work is being done by the servers on the other side. The sorting, sending, even storage exists on a collection of servers managing your mail, scanning for viruses and spam and more. You no longer need to have an email application on your computer and you no longer need to store email on your computer.
That's a very simple example but there are many more. Some of you may have been to a website called HouseCall which is a site for free virus scanning online. This replaces (to a limited degree) the application installed on your computer that scans for viruses. GoogleApps is an excellent example of Cloud Computing which competes with Microsoft Office in which word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software as well as document storage is handled online. Even YouTube is an example. With YouTube I can capture video, convert it, and play it. I used to have to install iMovie, Sorrenson Video and QuickTime to do all of that.
If this sounds a little familiar to some of the older or more savvy computer users, that's because it is not new. In fact cloud computing is, essentially, network computing or grid computing. Those that remember the days of dumb terminals might have already picked up on that. To paraphrase Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer and that which sits on our desktop becomes little more than a widow into it.
While each example I have given requires a computer running a web browser, other methods could be used to access cloud computing but this is just an introduction. Over the coming weeks, I'll talk and write in detail about more. In the mean time, see if you can spot some examples of Cloud Computing and post them as comments to this article.
In order to understand Cloud Computing, let's set the framework for the current model of computing. Think about the way you typically work today. You sit down to your computer, open a file in your documents folder with an application installed on said computer and create a piece of work. If you want to do something different, you open another application on your computer or install another application on your computer to give you more capability. Eventually your computer runs out of memory, storage, processing power or whatever and needs to be replaced with a new more powerful system.
Cloud Computing is different. It refers to the use of multiple networked computers (the cloud) as the primary resource for the computing tasks. That could mean that the software, storage and processing resides on some computers other than your own. Perhaps the most commonly recognizable example of this is our own campus webmail. By using your browser, you access your email but all of the work is being done by the servers on the other side. The sorting, sending, even storage exists on a collection of servers managing your mail, scanning for viruses and spam and more. You no longer need to have an email application on your computer and you no longer need to store email on your computer.
That's a very simple example but there are many more. Some of you may have been to a website called HouseCall which is a site for free virus scanning online. This replaces (to a limited degree) the application installed on your computer that scans for viruses. GoogleApps is an excellent example of Cloud Computing which competes with Microsoft Office in which word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software as well as document storage is handled online. Even YouTube is an example. With YouTube I can capture video, convert it, and play it. I used to have to install iMovie, Sorrenson Video and QuickTime to do all of that.
If this sounds a little familiar to some of the older or more savvy computer users, that's because it is not new. In fact cloud computing is, essentially, network computing or grid computing. Those that remember the days of dumb terminals might have already picked up on that. To paraphrase Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer and that which sits on our desktop becomes little more than a widow into it.
While each example I have given requires a computer running a web browser, other methods could be used to access cloud computing but this is just an introduction. Over the coming weeks, I'll talk and write in detail about more. In the mean time, see if you can spot some examples of Cloud Computing and post them as comments to this article.
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