TOPIC:

THE federal government's scheme providing high school students with laptop computers is on the brink of collapse, leaving parents with hefty bills and educators with a chaotic start to the school year.
Less than two years after Kevin Rudd's Labor government started handing out laptops to schoolchildren around the country many are complaining they are too slow and act as expensive paperweights most of the time."They're not the best laptops in the world,". "They're slow and small, and I notice they have these really good and expensive programs on them – but some are so slow that it's hard to use them because the laptop can hardly run them. If we have to do photo editing, most kids would just use one of the computers at school rather than the laptops."

IT GOES AND ON. WHY DOESNT THIS SURPRISE ME.

I have been messing around with computers for years and a good friend of mine came to me with a laptop that was issued to his son. They are running old fashion Hyper-threading CPUs. These CPUs were phased out over five years ago and the programs that are installed on these computers are current bloated rubbish that require high end CPUs and heaps of RAM. The programs that are installed on these computers cost heaps of money. This whole excersise is just a huge waste of money. I could not believe that this laptop took over four minutes to boot up and it over three minutes to load Photoshop.

There wouldnt have been problem had the `THUG` won power, the libs dont give f**k all for education, just like they dont build freeways or railway lines!

Im not knocking the concept, im all for good education programs. A good tradesman has good tools and these computers are weak as p155. Over a million computers that are obsolete and will end up in land fill. How does a five year program run out of money in two years. ??????????????????????????????

winger, go to a shop today, buy a computer(of any sort)and its obsolete by the time you get it home, so what you are suggesting had the labor party spent billions more on laptops they would have been better? no mate still obsolete by the time you get it home,

Intel have been making Core Two Duo CPUs for over eight years. These CPUs are more than capable to run high end programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premeier. The school issue laptops are running Atom single CPUs. The CPUs are in line with mobile phone technology.

The Lenovo netbooks handed out to NSW students in 2009 and 2010 sport a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 2GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive and 10-inch screen. The N450 CPU offers middling performance and is below the minimum specifications set by Adobe, which recommends that CS4 apps like Photoshop have at least a 1.8GHz CPU. And that's just to get the application running; as students know, actual performance is invariably much slower once they try to do real work on them.

So in essence a seven year old laptop running an Intel 2.0Hz Core Two Duo with 1 GB of RAM would boot up and run all the programs sweet.

Winger wrote: Intel have been making Core Two Duo CPUs for over eight years. These CPUs are more than capable to run high end programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premeier. The school issue laptops are running Atom single CPUs. The CPUs are in line with mobile phone technology.

The Lenovo netbooks handed out to NSW students in 2009 and 2010 sport a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 2GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive and 10-inch screen. The N450 CPU offers middling performance and is below the minimum specifications set by Adobe, which recommends that CS4 apps like Photoshop have at least a 1.8GHz CPU. And that's just to get the application running; as students know, actual performance is invariably much slower once they try to do real work on them.

So in essence a seven year old laptop running an Intel 2.0Hz Core Two Duo with 1 GB of RAM would boot up and run all the programs sweet.

Cocko's head just exploded!

`OBSOLETE`

My son got a brand new Apple Mac in year 11 and had to hand it back as he is doing a pre apprenticeship this year but I got a letter from the school saying due to funding the program will no longer continue. I think it was for year 11's and 12's (not 100% on that).

Obviously they still have hundreds of Apple Macs that are just 1 yr old and perhaps year 8 - 10 students will have them? Surely those laptops are good for 3 years (maybe some extra RAM added after 2 years) and the cost of those spread over 3 years is not significant and can easily be justified?

And surely due to the massive size of the order they would have got them for little over cost? Of course there is the software as well but again, they would get a great deal on that. We (parents) had to pay for the laptop bag and external hard drive. He got to keep the hard drive.

Most of the private schools went with the Macs with no problems, i dont if the public schools went with the Macs. The software came with multipul licenses as with the Windows machines. Even though the Windows laptops had all the latest hardware, the speed of the RAM / HDDs and the CPUs are really for smart phones that run unbloated apps not to run high end programs like all the Adobe stuff.