[ale] Converting 600 old laptops into K12LTSP thin clients for 1:1 ratio at a middle school

[Dow_Hurst]

You should do what James suggested and find out the battery state for each one and what new batteries would cost.  That might be quite expensive if it becomes a necessary item for the project.  I'd check out the laptop versions in the mix of hardware and see if you could build a kickstart process to auto build all of them the way you want.  If all that pans out then you might get somewhere.  You will have to have some type of autobuild process for that many laptops.  Maybe a couple of build servers could service 10 to 20 laptops at a time.  I wonder how much RAM each laptop has.  They probably are not wifi enabled being that old, so you will need to check on builtin ethernet.  I remember back at KSU that the two people building a set of 40 laptops needed several days to image all 40 in sets of 5 due to their cart setup.  They were using Ghost and WinXP images.

It sure is amazing to see how much money is spent now in education on technology.  Sometimes I wonder if paper, pencils, and chalkboards should come back in force!!  I love the tech but the upgrade path for schools is so fraught with waste.  I've seen so much hand me down machines that really worked fine.  They just needed a thin client solution or a bit more RAM and so on.  I think it is great your looking at this project.  You could save the district $100K by getting these running if it works out.  A decent lightweight laptop from Dell with 3 years of the right kind of hardware support is not cheap, probably about $1500 minimum.  Multiply that by 600!!

You can't load a kid down with a 10lb bag full of laptop hardware and expect them to treat it well.  I've seen alot of heavy laptops getting dragged around by fullgrown college kids.  They don't look happy carrying the weight and most of them paid for the laptop themselves!!  My laptop is about 5lbs and I think it is too heavy most of the time.  It has Nvidia graphics or else I would have tried to go less heavy.  I noticed that Dynamism has a new lightweight laptop with Nvidia 7800 graphics.  Rather expensive but probably well worth it!  
Dow


-----Original Message-----
>From: Daniel Howard <dhhoward at comcast.net>
>Sent: May 21, 2006 9:32 AM
>To: schoolforge-discuss at schoolforge.net
>Cc: ale at ale.org
>Subject: [ale] Converting 600 old laptops into K12LTSP thin clients for 1:1 ratio at a middle school
>
>Folk,
>
>I've know of a school that has over 600 older laptops (either Win98 or
>Win2k) for a 1:1 grant-funded study in 2000 that now only has 50
>functional units, assumedly due to viruses, upgrading OS w/o adding more
>memory, lack of support, etc.  We want to consider converting these into
>K12LTSP thin clients using our laptop cart idea, but I wanted to make
>sure we were considering all options.
>
>We could probably load Linux OS directly onto each laptop and keep them
>as stand-alone units so the kids could take them home as the original
>model proposed, but the support issue (number of PCs to support) along
>with the need to plug them in to power daily in the classrooms and
>either plug network in or log on wirelessly makes that less desirable.
>I'd rather see the kids stay after school for a few hours to do homework
>on them when necessary and reduce the number of PCs to support by a
>factor of 50 by turning them all into thin clients that stay at the school.
>
>Are there any other ideas out there for what to do to revive 600 drunken
>laptops?
>
>Regards,
>Daniel
>
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