Mac at school.

Hello,

I am sick and tired of the windows computers always crashing at my school. I would like to try and convince the computer teacher to buy macs. It would be sweet and nothing would crash.

Every day something dosen't work right. the printers take lke an hour to print because the server cant handle it or you cant log on because something is broken.

I think that they are spending wayyy to much money now and could save money by buying macs. One more thing. The school network is part of a bigger network in the School district. I don't think it will be a problem though because macs can play nice with PC's (sometimes)

So, could you guys help me come up with an arguement about why macs would be the best thing and why we should spend money on macs.

Well, one fly in the ointment. If they are already planning to spend money to buy new computers, you have a chance, but if they are not, I doubt you could convince them to replace what they have with Macs just for stability.

and schools generally have contracts with computer companies and they go with the lowest offer
-chris

Coming from the education field, I've always noted that school board trustees love to see pro-active students sharing their creative, educational projects. If you can get permission, how about a multi-media presentation using all that great iLife software, showing them just what you can accomplish with it. You might be surprised at how close they are to making a decision to go Mac. Remember, although schools are penny-pinching institutions, they also don't want to spend tons of extra money on tech support. Just make it a positive experience, show the good, don't rant about the bad. Just an idea.

I'd agree with yosemite3 on this, we had Dell Computers sorted by the Local Education Authority but they ran like crap and they always need Tech Support and I'm sure they were paying through the Teeth for it.

If I had the balls I defiantly would of done it, as they were due to upgrade there systems but I never and they stayed with Dell Just aswell I left soon after I had enough.

It would be good to find some statistics, if you can find them from perceived authoratative sources, regarding the number of virus', trojans, etc. that target PCs vs the same for Mac. The Mac number will be very small. This could help.

In an equivalent vein, I wonder if there are any stats published that show the average number of help desk calls per PC user per time period in a business environment vs. the same for Macs. I bet the Macs are lower.

All of this would help support the idea that the ongoing operations expense for Macs is lower than the same for PCs. This could be an interesting business case all by itself...

...again, assuming they are open to new capital expenditures at all!

I wrote a letter of concern to my computer department head at my school last year after the 40 computer crashes we had within a 2 weeks period of time. They called me in about my letter and had me explain more about ways we could implement macs more inexpensively, and what it would do for us. In the end we had a complete 360 on the implementing macs idea, and now we're in the process of implementing Ubuntu Linux on 400+ pcs, configuring application distributers, anti-virus and firewalls etc. So far we have converted 3 computer labs to Ubuntu successfully (about 200pcs). The students really like the Ubuntu systems, and our department head didn't have to figure out much to set up blocks so the students didn't screw up the computers. All in all everything went smoothly. I would have liked to have had the macs but I still like the Ubuntu OS, which I have a dual boot set up of on my g4 mac mini. Cost was just to much of a concern to throw out the 400+ pos dells we just bought for 400+ macs. But anything besides windows and I'm content.

our school used macs all the way up to the eMacs. We then started to get windows computers. Our school as bass ackwards. we have windows in comm tech room (multimedia stuff) and macs in the buisness labs.

I had Macs (old performas) during my 1st thru 9th class.

When joining tenth, in Switzerland you join a new school, so this new place was all PCs... and to top if off, they're still all running Windows 2000. Sweet, right?

And they struggle so much with the user system they have, it takes around 10 minutes to log into a computer and most of the time, you'll find your fiels having disappeared. We were given 20MB of network storage for our school paperwork etc., but I in our class no-one has ever used it.

Our partner school has iMac G5s all over. And their's just work, with user pictures and all....

my school is sponsored by microsoft
so no firefox
no speakers on computers, no cd drives

and a restricted internet access where even google is blocked
but then we discovered pinging ip's and accessing websites that way
then they blocked that

Most schools share there networks with 2 -3 other schools. Wait after school for about two hours and check out the download speeds 2 megabites a second, no joke i was so impressed!

I work for my school district when I have breaks from college, and we use mostly Dells, except for two Mac labs. I'm not going to say we don't have issues, but login time and things like that usually depend on how many people are using the network at that time. 40 crashes in two weeks? That's insane... I have no idea what would cause that. Maybe someone's image was faulty? Anyway, to the original poster, I would imagine schools won't just jump into completely changing all of their computers, as that is expensive, and school boards (in my district, anyway) aren't too big on change or spending useless money. Good luck, though.

Unless you can make a very convincing arguments as to why Macs would be so much more productive than PCs then I doubt you will get very far. It is not just a simple case of changing over the hardware and software, the person in charge of maintaining the computer network may have no experience in Macs.

People don't like change, they like to stick with what they know best, especially in businesses and schools. Plus, how will the other students react?

[FONT=COMIC SANS MS,PALATINO,BOOKMAN OLD STYLE,HELVETICA,ARIAL,TIMES]God made the idiot for practice, and then He made the school board.
— Mark Twain
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Another excellent and insightful post Brown_Study!! :dive:

Brown Study said:

[FONT=COMIC SANS MS,PALATINO,BOOKMAN OLD STYLE,HELVETICA,ARIAL,TIMES]God made the idiot for practice, and then He made the school board.
— Mark Twain
[/FONT]

Click to expand...

Haha, so true! Schools and universities have no idea how to spend money sensibly with any rational behind the spending. Like the university I used to goto splashed out £30m on a new reception?! Nice to see they are spending my tuition fees on the essentials..

If they're elasing the computers instead of buying them, like most companies, the tech support is included. You might want to check out what kind of deal they have before making your argument to them. That way you won't present unimportant information.

Good luck! Let us know how it goes.