Every four years the desktop computers in RBHS get an upgrade through the Renewal Recycle program. During the past few weeks and in the next few weeks, new computers will arrive day by day to upgrade the four-year-old computers that sit throughout the building.
“It is just an upgraded computer. It is a better processor, better RAM,” media center specialist Dennis Murphy said. “With anything, four years later the technology is always a lot better.”
Murphy said the old computers will be sold to a company that recycles them in a proper way. Because of end-of-course testing and other tests that will go on in the next few weeks that require computers and computer labs, the computers that need replacing in the labs will be replaced closer to the end of the year rather than now.
“[The labs] are all set up to do the testing, the course testing and everything,” Murphy said. “So rather than putting the new up on a computer that might have to work with bugs, we are not going to swap them out in the middle of all that because they might have issues and we don’t want to deal with that.”
As far as now, Murphy said, the computers that have been replaced are the ones in the Media Center and most of the teacher computers, at least the ones that need to be replaced.
“It goes by actual model, when the model was bought,” Murphy said. “You could have two [computers] side-by-side and one might be replaced and one not. We have to go through and find all the old ones and make sure they are still in the building and we can say where they are and then replace them.”
Senior Alp Kahveci said he saw the new computers in the EEE room and in the Media Center but said that in his experience with them he did not notice a big difference from the old computers.
“The [old] computers are very outdated computers, very outdated technology, somewhat slow,” Kahveci said. “They are still not that fast now … I don’t think that they are much faster to be honest, I mean I haven’t noticed it, but they don’t have the ‘please wait.’ The [new] computers give students a better ability to integrate their academics into technology.”
 
By Abdul-Rahman Abdul-Kafi