... 8th graders pick them up later (next week?). The kids are full-on excited about it. Students appear to be treating them ok so far. No rough treatment like one sees with textbooks. Maybe more a sense of ownership? The current hot topic is how to set one's own desktop background graphic.
They are actually netbooks rather than laptops and they appear to be running XP. Two USB ports, probably a 10" screen. No docking slot that I could see. HD rather than SSD, which I find odd. I would have thought the SSD would be much sturdier for kids.
The RISD wifi seems to work seamlessly for the kids. Some have had problems with their home wifi, but this may be related to some wonky wireless network app settings that are apparently being push-fixed by IT.
The lids are engraved "property of RISD", etc.
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Seems I remember the days when calculators were not allowed for tests. What a change!
My company's been doing some research on solid state drives to determine wether to use them in the next laptops we purchase. Apparently, there's been a history of high failure rate that's only been addressed in the past couple of months, and they're not at all sure that the SSD drives will last as long as standard drives. So with that and the price difference, I can see why they held off and went for the platter drives.
The reported failure rate of SSDs appears to be be largely based on a consultant's article about early Dell return rates. Dell rebutted and the consulting group has decided not to respond/clarify.
Most technical articles I have read suggest the SSDs have lower failure rates (ie, greater MTBF) than SATA platters and higher rates than two-disk SATA RAID arrays. SSDs do suffer from eventual/theoretical capacity reduction due to wear on any given "cell" so the controllers generally implement some form of "wear leveling". It's not clear how that will play out in the real world.
Since students don't really need 160GB of space (or whatever the capacity was) I would think a 8GB SSD would be quicker to boot and more resistant to kid-induced shock. Both of these are important in scenarios where the kids are whipping the netbook out multiple times each day.
My guess is the platter was cheaper and the vendor has agreed to replace them under warranty if they fail.
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