My highschool's computers are awful! And I just have to deal with it!
If you have ever been to any school then you will know what I mean by the "School Computers" usually they're low(ish) cost, basic PCs that are used my students to "Get work done".
Now when I was in pre-school they had a bunch of laptops and desktops, which for the time, were actually not that bad, I remember them running Windows Xp and runnning it quite well, they did the tasks that they were set out to do , and they did those tasks with no issues, they were even able to run some pretty basic games. When I went up to the first few years of elementary school they had some much better desktops, I remember them being Dell computers, also running Xp at the time, which was fine because this was 2007, and those PCs weren't actually that bad, from what I can remember, those sorts of computers were used for about 3 years, and they were perfectly fine for what they needed to do... Fast-forward to half way through Elementary and we moved buildings to the more "Junior years", they had a much larger IT room with many more computers, from what I can remember, they were all running the then new(ish) Windows 7 (This would have been in ~2011 when I moved up from the lower end of my elementary) I remember that the computers were these beige machines that had beige CRTs to match, that wasn't really a problem for me though, as those PCs were actually well suited and powerful enough to run Windows 7 with all of its extra features such as aero and its more complex animations compared to Xp that I had used before it, although those PCs looked old, and yes they used CRTs, they worked well... Until my elementary decided that they would get rid of the IT room, to extend the 4th and 5th grade classrooms, so the computers had to go... which wasn't really a problem with me at the time... until they replaced them all with iPads that were completely unfit for the purpose... god those things were awful, and locked down as hell, you couldn't do anything with them... But all of that was about to change.
Now the way I moved from school to school was a bit unconventional, in our village there were three separate areas, pre-school, "Infant School" and "Junior School" pre-school was exactly what you think would be, a pre-school (or Kindergaten, if you prefer it to be put that way), now what about the Elementary school? well that was split in two, the first three years at "Infant School" and the last four at "Junior School", creating a total of 7 years, I didn't actually go to a middle school (mainly because there wasn't one) instead my journey was more like: Pre-school → Infant School → Junior School → Secondary School, and that's where the real IT issues started. You see when I joined that school, all of the computers were Pentium Ds, Pentium 4s or Pentuim Dual-Cores (from the Core 2 Duo era)... Yes, not even any Core 2 Duos, all of those PCs had a maximum of 2GB of slow 667Mhz DDR2 and were trying their best to run a very bloated version of Windows 7 Pro, a very locked down copy of 7 Pro with all the visuals diabled, the user interface looked, and performed horribly, not to mention the fact that if you wanted to launch chrome, you would have to click on it, wait, wait for it to not resond, click on it again, wait again, and then have it actually come up, yes the systems were really unstable... They also had CRTs, which mind you wasn't the problem, the problem was that they were locked in at 60Hz, which, as you had guessed was pretty damn horrible. We had these geriatric computers for a whole year. At that time I didn't really care much for them, but the summer after, when they had been preplaced I did actually want one, for keepsakes etc, I did actually want one of the monitors, that of which were piled high by the site teams' shed, my request was ignored, but I didn't really care too much at the time (I'm a bit pissed now though), what we upgraded to were a set of i3 machines (some 2nd gen, some 4th gen), which were fine for the task of Windows 7.
However, as time went on my affinity for computers grew, around early summer 2016, only ~2 or so years after I initially joined that highschool, there were still some systems left over from before the upgrade, notably an RM systems "RM One" All in one, one of the Pentium D computers with a floppy drive in it and a system from ~2000 (633Mhz Celeron, 256MB PC133 SDRAM) that included a Aperture Grille CRT, all of those systems I wanted, with my main focus being towards the system from 2000, with the monitor being what I realy wanted (The monitor was an Iiyama VisionMaster Pro 411, 17' Flatscreen CRT) , however after going back and fourth with different people in the school, they decided that I could have the PC... but they would have to take out the PSU and the hard drive, and that the monitor I wanted was "Dangerous" and that it didn't actually work and I couldn't have it, however I knew in reality that it did work, and that they were kidding me, because I had went into the room where it was being stored, I had brougt in a laptop and confirmed that it did indeed work... That made me really pissed, and years on I am still pissed about it, that was a perfectly good, fully functional Aperture Grille monitor... I knew I should have stolen it!
So fast forward to 2019, after the summer break, and the fast approaching deadline of Windows 7's EOL, my highschool decided to finally upgrade to Windows 10 (Thankfully not Windows 8 XD), at the start of the new school year this would have been a good idea in theory, however their again server had NOT been updated, neither had any of the networking layouts, so everything maxxed out at a 100megabit connection (12.5Mb/s), and the server running it was at the time pretty ancient, still to this day I dont know whether they have updated it... Still, it took ages to log on, ages to launch any program, etc, etc... the systems were pretty much unusable, one time taking me a total of 25 minutes to log in, and download a file... that was almost half of a lesson wasted trying to get the damn thing I needed, not great, however one good thing that came about the upgrade was the fact that you could better customise your profile, personally I have small taskbar buttons enabled and use the Windows 10 Dark Theme, which is better for my sensitive eyes (It's a genetic thing with my family), some people even changed their mouse cursors to other things... However the party was soon pooped when the Cunt admins decided to lock down the systems as heavily as possible... now my dark theme is gone and I get a head ache every time I log in... Not pleased.
As a side note, there is this laptop, another piece of technology by RM, specifically an RM N-Book 4110 (basically a Compal AL55), it's a good little Windows Xp battle station, it performs pretty well and is actually pretty snappy for a mere 1.7GHz Pentium M, one problem though, they will not let me have it even though I know 100% that they never use it, I know that I am the only person who is using it, there is this other one kid that wants it, but screw him, he's not getting it, if he does I will personally beat up my personal assistant, the person currently in charge of that thing (It isn't even hers, I dont know what the hell she was doing...) as she promised that if she could give it to me she would, and no one else would have it, I mean I had been using that thing for quite a few years at that time (It is what I actually used to write the majority of this page) I even used it through college as a note taking laptop after my craptop decided to literally jump off a table (I mean it was only a 4005u... noting was really lost other than some of my money), I had been using the 4110 for quite a while, though it had one small problem that I probably should have gotten round to adressing, and that was the admin account that was on it, I probably should have removed or unlocked it as it restricted the "Guest" account in what it could do, and one of those things was the internet, yes this laptop had WiFi and a proper ethernet jack with the connectivity LEDs and everything, pretty cool, however the admin cunt account disallowed me from accessing the internet, because the previous user wasn't allowed to use the internet, so was given this... and when they stopped using it the admins never bothered to remove the restriction... Those lazy idiots... So though I can use this for quite a lot actually, the one thing I can't do is use the internet (or connect an external/secondary display)... Pretty annoying to be honest.
So what have we learned about school computers? Well... they're really not good without the correct configuration, if they have the correct OS and a decent server they should be fine, they are also fine if they're not totally locked down by sysadmin, which just made me remember about the "Smoothwall" internet filter... Yeah that thing, however I will not be talking about that in THIS rant, that will be saved for another, as that pisses me off more than many other thing.
Update: Just before I left that college they updated pretty much all of the systems to newer Ryzen 3 - based systems, meaning that you caould actually get work done for once, this sort of means that this document is a little bit outdates seeing the computers aren't actually bad anymore (They're only Ryzen 3 3200Gs, but that's a hell of a lot better than the pretty terrible 4th Gen Core i3s that were in there before, the integrated graphics is better at least), so that part of the argument isn't really true anymore, not that I even really used them that much, I may have only logged in two or three times to check on something, as I used my own laptop where-else to aviod programs that I couldn't access on the network, unfortunately the internet filtering still exists which is a bit of a bummer, but at least the systems are passible.