Macs gone at university lab.

[SeaFox]

I was there printing a paper this summer and they had this new stupid payment system for laser prints, it takes money out of a debit-style account (not bank related) everyone has. The Macs (15 iMacs in a room of 50 Dells) were not set up with the system, but I was told they would in the fall. I had to go run and get some paper to use with the printers the Macs were networked to.

Well, it's now fall. I came to the lab and found all the iMacs replaced with new Dells. :eek: There were a couple iMacs still there, but they were unhooked and turned with their screens facing the wall, crowded behind the Dells sitting in their places.

I bet the univeristy found they couldn't integrate the iMacs into their printing scheme easily and since bringing your own paper is much cheaper per sheet than paying 8 cents a page felt they had to remove the Macs.

So now I'm pissed. I used to work on papers at home and save them on my iDisk and access them for further editing and printing at school. But I can't access my iDisk from the PC's (they have network drive mapping locked up). Plus I'm just angry in general about them getting rid of all the Macs.

I was going to get a Powerbook when Tiger was released, but now I'm thinking of getting an old G3 iBook until then so I can still use a Mac on campus (Wi Fi all over the Union and libraries).

[jsw]

That sucks. Which college/university?

[SeaFox]

That sucks. Which college/university?

University of Kansas.

I sent a couple emails out hoping to get more information as to why the Macs were removed and were they've gone to. They might be in another public lab now. They'll probably say the machines weren't getting much use and the PC's were more "in-demand" which is true. But that's all FUD on student's part. When the lab would get busy people would be standing around waiting for PC's to become available while Macs sat unused. I know some of them were there to use the internet of type on their papers in Word. But most don't know the Word files are cross platform compatable and people always thought the Macs were slow because web pages took so long to pull up in IE (few realised the Safari icon on the dock would solve that).

One issue was the univeristy resticting use of computers to everyone having to log in to the network. The script they had doing this on the Macs made them get stuck quite often with a barber-pole progress bar or sometimes a beach ball. And forced power off was the only way to escape. So many people I believe got the idea the macs were crash-prone. Never had any problems with them before they added that stupid security.

[SilentPanda]

So now I'm pissed. I used to work on papers at home and save them on my iDisk and access them for further editing and printing at school. But I can't access my iDisk from the PC's (they have network drive mapping locked up). Plus I'm just angry in general about them getting rid of all the Macs.

You should be able to access your files (and you can password protect it too) from you .Mac homepage... still stinks you can't map to a network drive (and that the iMac's are stowed away)... but that should work for ya.