Speckled Green

On Thursday 24th September, 2009, Year 9 students at Baulkham Hills High School started receiving their Lenovo netbooks. As I started writing this in a science lesson on Friday arvo in the library, I was talking to a friend in year 9 asking about them.

Aparrently, they have a program installed on them which prevents the running of exe files that haven’t been authorised (work around found within 2 hours of getting the netbook…). Internet Explorer 8 is automatically set-up to use the DET’s proxy server/internet portal. THEY HAVE RIGHT-CLICK ABILITIES (we at Baulko do not on the school comps…)!! They have (strangely) Windows Live Messenger installed on them already, but they aren’t allowed to use it… Office 2007 loaded in, and as far as I could tell, a fully licensed copy of Windows 7 Home Premium (I couldn’t tell if it was RC or not, but it looked like Retail…), Photoshop Elements 7, Google Sketch Up 7, and various other programs.

They get a free netbook and free software?! Grr… Anyways. The netbooks seem like pieces of junk compared to your usual laptop (13″, 14″, 15″, 16″, 17″ take your pick, they’re all better it seems), but then again, netbooks are meant to be ultra-portable, ultra-small, slimmed down laptops, so I guess that’s what you’d expect from them…

Talking about laptops, I wish Australia wasn’t so far behind the US with getting new hardware in computers. On Wednesday 23rd September (2009), Intel released the Clarksfield CPU, which is the mobile (laptop) version of the Core i7. At the time of release, Dell, HP, Asustek & Toshiba were the only people selling it. Dell immediately updated their laptop ranges, from Studio 15 upwards, to include the Core i7 as an option for the computers in the US. Australia? All we got was the top model of the Studio 15 and one of the Alienware laptops updated to include Core i7. I wonder how long till the other laptops get the new core… I’d like to my own laptop sometime in the next 4 months… But I need to study, so back to the science work (ARGH!!! SO MUCH STUFF TO REVISE!!!!)