Channel
Computer Barn Upgrade
It is always our aim to provide a quality standard computing
environment to support the academic and general computing needs of our
students in the Computer Barns. Despite the tight budget constraint,
I’m pleased to let you know we have managed to upgrade some PCs and
replaced some of the aging equipment in the Computer Barns.
PC upgrades
In the three ITSC Computer Barns, we have approximately one hundred PCs
that were upgraded to Pentium 4-2.4Ghz over last summer and around two
hundred plus units remained as Pentium 3-1Ghz. Recently, a further 120
units of these Pentium 3-1Ghz, located in Computer Barn A’s General
area and Computer Barn C’s Teaching area, were upgraded to a higher
performance Pentium 4 - 3.0Ghz with 512M memory and 80G hard disk. At
the same time, the 17” CRT color monitors in these two areas, which
were purchased over seven years ago, are replaced with new 17” LCD
monitors. We hope this will relieve the eye strains of our hard working
students who need to work long hours in the Computer Barns.
Printer replacements
With today’s sophisticated graphic files, ever-increased complexity and
large files size, a high speed and powerful color printer is needed to
cope with their printing need. To meet this need, the color LaserJet
8550 printer in Computer Barn B will be replaced by the latest high
performance model Color LaserJet 5550, which is capable of printing up
to 27 color pages per minute, a significant improvement from the 6
pages per minute color printing speed of the 8550 model. As for the
existing LaserJet 8550, it will be relocated to Barn A, to replace the
existing color printer there.
With the heavy usage on the Black & White LaserJets too, a few of
them could no longer withstand the continuous high usage, they became
noisy and had frequent paper jams. Some of the LaserJets had to be
declared out of service frequently and caused inconvenience and
frustration to the users. Five units of LaserJet 9050 are purchased to
replace these units. With the faster performance and better
compatibility of the new model 9050, this will help to solve some of
the recent problems reported concerning large PDF/PowerPoint print
files, which caused the printers to hang.
Scanner replacements
Two HP ScanJet 4500c had frequent failure reporting recently. As this
model has already become obsolete and not justifiable for repair, two
new scanners have been purchased to replace them. The new scanners are
HP ScanJet 5590, equipped with a duplex automatic document feeder. To
facilitate the needs of photo processing & imaging, and creation of
PDF files from hardcopies, two software will be added to the computers
attaching to the scanners: Photoshop CS 8.0 and Adobe Acrobat 7.0.