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Rudd giveaway gripes: students slam 'slow' laptops
August 15, 2011

Less than two years after Kevin Rudd's Labor government started
handing out laptops to schoolchildren around the country many are
complaining they are too slow and act as expensive paperweights most
of the time, writes David Braue.

In 2007 Rudd spun his education revolution into a broadband
revolution, promising to spend $1 billion to provide a computer with
high-speed internet access for every student in years 9 to 12.

Like thousands of other year 10 students, Luca Vignando has had his
NSW government-supplied netbook, provided under Labor's Digital
Education Revolution (DER) funding, since he began year 9. But it's
not much use: less than two years down the track, Vignando and his
peers are finding the units just aren't up to snuff any more.

Microsoft Word and OneNote work OK, but Vignando says bundled
multimedia applications like Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and video-
editing tool Premier Elements run at a crawl. Students needing to do
more than basic text editing often give up and seek out faster
computers elsewhere.

"They're not the best laptops in the world," he says. "They're slow
and small, and I notice they have these really good and expensive
programs on them – but some are so slow that it's hard to use them
because the laptop can hardly run them. If we have to do photo
editing, most kids would just use one of the computers at school
rather than the laptops."

That's a pretty low appraisal of devices that were meant to empower
NSW students as citizens of the digital world. Yet they've had the
opposite effect, at least in his Sydney high school, where Lenovo
ThinkPad Mini 10 netbooks (and comparable units from other years) are
mainly used for basic entertainment – or not at all – by kids that
find they're just too much effort for doing real work.

"I personally use it as little as possible – probably 10 minutes a day
– and most people only use it when they have to," he says. "Everyone
says they never use them on holidays, and if I'm doing homework at
home I wouldn't use it unless I've already started working on
something in it. Teachers know they're pretty bad, and some teachers
don't even let kids use the laptops any more because they find half
the kids are just playing games in class anyway."

Ref: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/rudd-giveaway-gripes-students-slam-slow-laptops-20110812-1iq3w.html#ixzz1Vbz5Qy7o