The Joys of Printing
I find myself wondering this morning why it takes me 15 minutes to log in and print a 6 page document in the law school computer lab (I can do this in the university’s main library in under 60 seconds). Upon entering my login and password it took 10 minutes to get to a usable desktop, and another 5 minutes to open and print a six page, text-only, document. Thankfully, logging out was a quick 3 minute process.
In that period of time, I could have installed a stripped down version of Windows Server 2003, set up OpenOffice, and connected to a shared printer in the law school. Additionally, I could have just printed wirelessly to one of the printers at work and spent the 15 minutes walking across campus (at least I would get some exercise that way).
Though I can’t confirm any of this, my suspicions as to why the law school computer lab is largely worthless are a follows:
- All the proprietary Novell Netware crap that must be loaded upon each user login.
- The Norton ’security’ suite that loads and loads and loads upon each user login.
- The law school’s refusal to implement other well tested (read: faster) computing standards adopted by the university’s institutional TIS.
- The money spent on all the nice new 20″ LCD displays was originally supposed to go to training the law school’s IT staff.
- The law school’s IT staff hates all the law school students, and figures if we get fed up enough with the law school’s lame system, we will just go use another computer lab (allowing them to pocket my $10 of “free” printing each semester).
I’m in my fourth year studying taxidermy and I love hunting deer…
Kathy Curtis