We are a mixed environment, although PCs greatly outnumber Macs. The
Music Department and Art Department have Mac labs. The Math Department
had a Mac lab, but they decided they would be better off with PCs and
they switched from Macs to PCs about 3 years ago. Several faculty
members have Macs, and the number of students with Macs probably mirrors
the general public. We also have a UNIX lab (actually LINUX) within the
computer science curriculum and it is integrated into the campus
network.
The percentage of problems with Macs is in the same ballpark as problems
with PCs. However, overall Macs cause less problems for our staff
simply because we do not provide internal hardware support for the Macs.
In a department like science where our lab computers and lobby computers
are PCs, if we have a problem, our own people fix the problem. When
there is a problem in one of the Mac labs, we hire an outside Mac person
to come fix the problem. This is mostly because we don't stock parts
for Macs and we don't have many tech personnel with experience working
on Macs. So our tech people will say the Macs are not a headache simply
because any problems that arise are somebody else's problems. That is
one of the reasons Math switched to PCs. They were having a hard time
keeping their Mac lab running and up to date.
Anyway, our head tech person prefers PCs but he is capable with Macs.
He definitely does not think his job would be easier if we had a higher
percentage of Macs if it meant he had to pick up all servicing on them
like he now does for PCs.
One of the problems he faces daily is people with different ages of
computers running different ages of software. We have Win95, Win98,
2000, ME, NT, XP all running on campus. We are fairly uniform on
faculty/staff, having just switched from Win98 to XP. The students are
another question.
Macs are not immune to this. The students with Macs have all ages, at
least going back to System 6. The most recent Mac OS upgrade creates
some compatibility problems for some students. The problem is they want
us to make things work for them, but they don't want to pay for
upgrades.
Some colleges are fairly dictatorial. They tell students that if they
want to hook onto the college network they have to have this computer
with this version of the operating system with this much memory. If you
don't have that, you can't connect. We make a recommendation, but we
try to work with whatever computer any student brings to college, and
with whatever computer faculty buy at home. With an open policy like
that you're going to have headaches no matter what system predominates.
How short-staffed are we? I don't know, someone help me out here. We
have approximately 1200 computers directly attached or with dial-up
capabilities. Our personnel have responsibility to provide at least
some support for all of these. They provide total support for about 300
of them. The number of people doing this is 4. One is a real computer
scientist and the others are ordinary folks trained by him.
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry and Physics
Bluffton College
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu
This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.