Wireless/laptop trolleys

[captaincharisma]

Morning all

 

Just a quick question to anyone that has laptop trolleys, how many do you have at your school?

 

We have over 200 laptops which are just for pupil use, I obviously don't need to explain how much of a headache this is for us.

 

I just wanted to get an idea of if anyone has the same, close to us or even more. We are trying to convince our head that more laptops will cause us more issues.

 

Thanks in advance.

[witch]

We have 20 laptops and 64 netbooks for pupil use. Doesn't sound a lot but there is only me and I am part-time!

[Paid_Peanuts]

We have 24 laptop trolleys with 15 in each!

They are for student use only and all connect using Ruckus wireless and work fine.

We have just replaced Dell latitude D530 laptops with Toshiba R850 laptops. The nice thing with the Toshibas are the nice secure island keyboard which hopefully will be more robust than the Dell keyboards were!

 

Usual problems: Batterys failing, keyboards being pulled apart, the odd screen cracked.

 

Given we have 360 laptops we dont get the level of damage you would expect... we are unlucky if we see 2 laptops a week that need fixing. However all staff over the last year have become aware that the old laptops were getting replaced so ignored any damage etc. so maybe it wasn't a true reflection of the actual damage. We are currently replacing the old laptops with the new as we speak so the real damage to the laptops may become apparant as we start to replace them.

[captaincharisma]

Thanks for the information, we have a Trapeze network with 3 full time staff and one part time. We struggle to keep up with maintaining our trolleys, some departments are better than others but some need babysitting!

 

Also as we are an RM school we have to run around and apply core upgrades to these laptops every couple of terms!

[Paid_Peanuts]

Similar situation here, there are 3 of us and we maintain 1050 clients and associated devices.

 

I decided to make departments pay for damage to laptops that was caused through anything other than wear and tear. So the department heads etc. know they will be footing the bill for any damage. Therefore they speak with their department and make it quite clear that the devices have to be looked after as it will be them that it is impacting with the impact to their budget.

Seems to work pretty well! I think if we just simply fixed all problems for everyone staff wouldn't give the laptops the same care and I am sure they certainly wouldn't keep such a close eye on the students!