Taranaki’s
Hawera High School, with a student roll of 800, has 180 computers and expects to replace
about 30 of them every year. For the past two years, and for the forseeable future, the
replacement stock has included recycled computers.
Hawera High’s ICT technician, Alastair
Williams, says it’s essential that the school keeps up the momentum of PC
replacement: "If you don’t keep new machines coming in, in a few years
you’ll end up with a number of machines that just won’t do the job for
you."
Buying only new machines for replacements is very
expensive, so two years ago the school decided to include recycled machines in the mix.
Ten CANZ IBM Pentium 266 desktops were bought from Wellington’s PC Recycling Channel.
"We decided the replacement policy should
tackle both ends of the power spectrum," says Williams.
"The recycled machines were able to replace our
oldest computers – older 386s and 486s that were running Windows 3.1.
"Then we needed new machines for the other end
– so we could keep up to date with new software and teaching programs such as
computing graphics and multimedia."
Williams says there was some initial opposition to
the idea of buying recycled machines, but "…most people very quickly saw the
benefits of updating the lower end as well as the higher end." Another ten recycled
machines were bought at the end of 2002, and more are likely to be ordered this year.
The recycled machines are spread across a variety of
school applications. Some have joined the school’s three specialist computer suites,
while others are being used by staff, or by English students in individual classrooms.
Generally the CANZ machines are being used in applications such as word processing and
spreadsheeting where raw processing speed is less important.
For these purposes, the recycled computers have been
quite speedy enough, Williams says. They have also been very reliable.
All the school’s computers are linked together
in a Novell network which includes two Novell servers, one mail server, one CD-ROM server
and a Wingate proxy server for Internet access. The setup cost was relatively high, but
Williams says its reliability is "second to none." He has worked on other
network systems but favours Novell because there are less hassles with it: "...the
ongoing development and maintenance costs can’t be beaten."
The major application software being used at Hawera
High School includes MS Office, Photoshop, PageMaker, Sibelius, Internet Explorer, Pegasus
Mail, multimedia CDs such as Encarta and Worldbook Brittanica and the MUSAC administration
suite.
Internet access
Access to the Internet via both IHUG’s Ultra satellite service and the Xtra’s
Jetstream 600 ADSL service. Jetstream was added because the Ultra connection was too slow
on the outward leg, which goes via dial-up modem. If too much data was being sent outward,
the whole system tended to choke and die. Jetstream is now used for all email. The aim is
eventually to send data out of the school via Jetstream and bring it in via Ultra. The
school is wary of receiving data via Jetstream, after a 9Mb file from a business was
accidentally re-sent all night long. The school used up its 600Mb allowance in one fell
swoop and was hit with a hefty extra traffic bill. By contrast, Ultra’s monthly
charge is for ‘all they can eat’.
