[LINK] Apple iPads for Victorian School Students

[Tom Worthington]

Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> ... Being familiar with the NSW netbooks, I'm more likely to say "a pox on 
> both their houses". ...

I have a Kogan generic netbook 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2009/08/kogan-agora-netbook-pro-mostly-good.html>

I assumed the Lenovo IdeaPad S10e issued to NSW school studetns would be 
simialr. The retail Lenovo comes with a quick boot Linux option 
installed along with Microsoft Windows: 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2009/04/linux-sneaks-onto-nsw-student-netbooks.html>.

> ... If they can't see the Dept of Ed login server, they're likely to object to being booted at all. ...

That would appear to be a problem with the way they have been
configured, not the machine itself. It would helop not trying to run 
Microsoft Windows.

> Login after boot is also slow; so in a 40 minute school period, about 5 
> minutes - one eighth the available time - would be lost before you start. ...

I suspend my unit during the day, rather than switch it off completely,
so do not need to reboot more than once a day.

> Because of the combination of processor and memory lameness and the 
> inescapable bloat of office software suites ...

The Kogan runs OpenOffice.org quite well. I assumed that it would work
okay on other low power netbooks.

Even OOO is overkill for educational purposes. My OOO broke a few weeks 
ago and I have not bothered getting it fixed so far. I have been using 
AbiWord for reading WP documents (it is not that good and so a good 
excuse for not doing many WP documents). For Powerpoint presentations 
people send me I tend to simply delete them unopened. Most of the 
documents I produce now are web based, so I don't need an office suite.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/user/3890