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General discussion

Community IT Facility

Dec 26, 2003 11:07PM PST

I am getting funding to set up a community IT faciity for training courses and open access. Does anyone have ideas what computers I should be looking at for 12 workstations and 1 instructor station? Should I network the system? Should I have a separate server or use the instructor's computer for that?

Discussion is locked

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Re:Community IT Facility. Depends on the course material.
Dec 26, 2003 11:38PM PST

If your course material is all CBT (Computer Based Training), then no network may be required. Just run the CBT and that's it.

Given that most training can be run on 2 year old machines, the requirements may be quite lax. If I was to setup some new facility, I'd look to moving away from desktop machines and use a dozen $699 to $799 laptops on a network. Then a Linux based server to cut costs by some thousands and the instructor's machine would be about the same.

But in the end, all this is driven by the course material.

Bob

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Re:Community IT Facility
Dec 26, 2003 11:44PM PST

To be honest, for a setup like that a thin client system might be your best option. Thin clients is the new name given to dumb terminals, where the computer being used is really little more than a terminal for a larger server.

What you sacrafice in speed of the individual client systems is vastly simplified administration. You need only patch the server if a security issue arises, and all clients are automatically patched along with it. You can also run applications over the network and most people will never know they aren't being run locally.

Now, the other catch is that Windows just doesn't really have the capabilities to do this, so you'd probably have to run some sort of Unix. Something that has real network transparency and doesn't care if some file is located on a network server half way across the world, or a local disk inside the server case. Windows just doesn't fit that description, and probably never will without a major rewrite. However, this doesn't rule out being able to teach some computing basics like using a web browser. You just have to use (IMO a far better choice anyway for many reasons) Mozilla or Netscape instead of IE. You can use something like the freeware open source OpenOffice for teaching the basics of word processing, and office type tools. And probably anything else you want to do, you can find a good alternative to the Windows counterpart which will serve you well for teaching the basics. It will also tend to keep costs down quite a bit and ease administrative chores significantly. All while exposing people to something other than Windows and Office so that if they ever run into something else in their life, they won't be hopelessly helpless because they only learned Office.