Posts by rockpile99

BOFH: The Boss is right, the applications of AI are truly staggering

Death by Window

What a great way to bring back an old favourite - top work Simon.

Atari 400 makes a comeback in miniature form

Gibberish

"both packing a 6502 processor and plenty the fastest graphics chips of the era"

Even by the new (merry can) El Reg English standards this makes no sense - did you mean "probably the fastest" or "plenty of"?

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

Re: School IT Network Admin/Manager thoughts

"buying them in lots of hundreds" - that's a massive assumption but I would love to have that kind of budget. We only have around 500 laptops/chromebooks in school and apart from the occasional motherboard failure any parts requiring replacement are because of vandalism.

We very rarely buy parts for Chromebooks (because of the costs I already mentioned) and my team are very adept at transplanting parts from scrapped devices.

School IT Network Admin/Manager thoughts

"Built down to a price, they're simple to open up and the components are cheap and widely available"

Parts are certainly not cheap and are often impossible to find e.g. £100 plus for a Lenovo keyboard or every parts supplier we talk to saying they can't get any parts for certain HP models. When you can get a new 14" Chromebook for around £250 repairing is often not a financially viable solution.

Chromebook start up times and battery life make them great for Education but because they're 'built down to a price' they don't withstand the abuse students give them as well as traditional laptops e.g. we've got over 100 Dell E5430 laptops still in service after nearly ten years (granted many have had SSD conversion, extra RAM, replacement batteries and new keyboards etc).

We're still trying to work out the best balance between Chromebooks and laptops. Realistically, even with 10 years Google support, the Chromebooks will end up on a faster replacement cycle.

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

New keyboard please

"So you ruined it for everyone."

"Not everyone. I also taught mine to HIDE FOR TWO WEEKS THEN REPEAT LAST INSTRUCTION – INDEFINITELY."

Nearly sprayed my lunch laughing - nice one Simon.

Why Chromebooks are the new immortals of tech

"Why? Because Chromebooks already last forever." - that might be true for a home user but not when it comes to Education environments.

As much as I love the relatively low cost and easy setup of Chromebooks, the expense & low availability of parts or how the chromebook is constructed often means writing off a device for fairly trivial vandalism/damage.

BOFH: A security issue, you say? Activate code tangerine

One of the best for a while - I must remember the QR code trick next time senior manglement suggest a survey.