My district recently decided to purchase some netbooks in order to fill a gap in needs at our intermediate campus. I have been following netbooks for the past several years and even purchased the original Asus Eee PC when it first came out. After quite a bit of diliberation, it was settled that we would purchase the Asus Eee PC 1005HA-VU1X. Our criteria for selection consisted on screen size, hard drive size, RAM, and perhaps most important - price. We considered a locally branded companion netbook, Acer Aspire One, Toshiba's netbook, and several Asus models. We choose the 1005HA because it fit the preferred 10.1" screen, 160GB hard drive, 1 GB RAM (upgradeable to 2 GB) and all that for the cheapest price.
The first item of business once they showed up was to get the first one out of the box and begin the process of creating a image that meets our district standard. The image creation process was a dream. I used an external USB CD/DVD-ROM drive to load Windows XP Professional (it came with XP Home Edition) per our Microsoft School Licensing Agreement. Then I inserted the included drivers CD and in less than an hour I had a fully functioning, bloatware free netbook. After a couple of days of loading programs, we attempted to capture the image using FOG. Unfortunately, FOG doesn't include the Atheros network driver needed by the Eee, so we fell back to using Symantec's Ghost. Counter space limited us to imaging only seven netbooks at a time, but in less than a day our technicians had them all ready to go.
Overall, I am pretty impressed with this netbook. It is small enough to be ultra-portable, yet had a nice size screen and just after a few minutes at the keyboard I was back up to my full typing speed (which is not very fast, but I was clicking along just as good as at my full size keyboard on my desktop). It is very responsive to commands and seems to handle 2-3 simultaneous programs as well as most other standard portable computers.
Edit: fixed a typo
Picture Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32685996@N08/3948311908/
4 comments:
This is a helpful post. When you say fill in the gaps...what do you mean in terms of number of machine and how the netbooks are being used? Are they in carts? labs? 1:1? We're trying to decide how to fill in our gaps.
Thanks.
Chris, thanks for the comment.
We have had some issues with computer lab space between two buildings on the same campus (our intermediate and middle school). They have three computer labs to share, but there are classes scheduled into some of the labs during the day that makes it difficult for teachers to use them to full effect. Therefore, our solution was to purchase 32 netbooks; placed into two carts of 16 netbooks each. Each classroom already has at least three desktops, so by adding another 16 computers to the room we get as close to a 1:1 ratio as we can. I would like to think this is a precursor to expanding into a full 1:1 roll-out with the 5th/6th grades, but we'll see how things go from here.
Good to know that they turned out to be so easy to image. That is important when looking at a school wide solution!
Sounds good...Beautiful lesson concept in every possible way...
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