Brenda Tavakoli
Senior Staff Writer
Students often find that the computers around campus just don't, well, compute. This problem plagues the computers in the residence halls, but help is apparently on the way.
Students trying to print a paper, check e-mail or do Internet research often meet with frustration, not results.
Some Moody Towers computer lab users said they have experienced significant problems.
"Sometimes (the computers) will be closed up, and we'll have to sit here for hours and wait for someone to fix the computers," said Foxx Johnson IV, freshmen mechanical engineering major and Moody Towers resident. "Half the time I've come down there's one computer working, and all the rest are shut down. They should spend some money on some new computers."
Quadrangle residents working in the computer lab Friday afternoon expressed strong opinions about the computer situation.
"It sucks. It always seems like the computers are breaking down. The printers mess up too," said Amanda Rozman, senior sociology major and Bates Hall resident. She added that at least one computer crashes during her daily visits to the lab.
"Right now, it won't save my paper on my disk. I've typed my paper twice on this computer. If I have to make more corrections, I'll have to type it again," said Marteba Beck, freshmen university studies major.
"The computers are down a lot," said junior English major Sonja McLaughlin.
"If the lab were bigger, that would not be a problem," McLaughlin added. She said that students should do their part to keep the lab functional. "A lot of people leave disks. Sometimes students screw things up."
Indeed, lab users seem aware of the havoc their fellow lab users are capable of wreaking. A handprinted sign on neon green paper near one of the cluster's computers read, "Do not insert your disk. It will get stuck."
Yet the sometimes cumbersome computer situation should soon be changing for residents, according to Andy Blank, executive director of Residential Life and Housing.
"Instead of using a Band-Aid approach, we went to the Ethernet," he said. "We're putting Ethernet outlets in every (residence hall) room."
Blank explained that Ethernet is "a communication protocol that basically is a form of sending information across a network. Ethernet happens to be one of the faster ones."
This will allow roommates to have their computers connected to the Internet simultaneously, without tying up the phone line.
"We're in the process of making sure every room in the Quad has an Ethernet outlet," Blank said. "We don't want to increase