IT's Love-Hate Relationship With Laptops

Ian Lamont writes "Are laptops really as great as they're cracked up to be? We love their portability, and we've been charting the steady rise of laptop sales for years. Yet while many of us depend on them for work, our IT departments view them with mixed feelings. IT managers point to wi-fi configuration, complicated authentication procedures, and eight other issues as making their jobs a lot harder. What else is missing from the list of laptop limitations? What would you like to see in the next generation of laptop computers?"

Comments

Laptops

[proudfoot]

Part of the issue is that people demand laptops when they don't need them. They do have the attractiveness of not having cords or other extraneous things that confuse users, but at the same time, being mobile is oftentimes not the best practice. Security is a major issue - can you trust that your data won't be compromised if lost or stolen? Do you have a reasonable backup? (Most people don't) For most employees, a desktop is often enough. And if laptops are handed out, then users need to be very, very careful. (Encrypt data, daily backups...) I'm thinking a better solution would have a laptop that works as a dumb terminal.

Re:Laptops

[thatskinnyguy]

They do have the attractiveness of not having cords or other extraneous things that confuse users ...and 80% of the people who have laptops where I work demand a mouse within the first few days of having the laptop because they refuse to get used to the touchpad.

Re:Laptops

[Stalus]

Your desktop can also be stolen, and the disk can crash. Ignoring those issues just makes you more vulnerable. I remember a class at UT-Austin where the prof went to put up his slides and realized the desktop under the podium was missing. Yes, that's right, someone lifted a desktop machine out of a lecture hall in the middle of the day on a crowded campus. And those things are normally locked down and alarmed. Quite surprising. Also, desktop HD's crash just as much as laptops.

I'd say that your argument enforces that laptops are better for most users because it causes some people to actually think about the relevant security and backup issues.

Re:Laptops

[Ephemeriis]

I'd say that your argument enforces that laptops are better for most users because it causes some people to actually think about the relevant security and backup issues.

It may very well make people consciously think about security and backup issues... But you simply cannot claim that desktops are equally vulnerable to the same kind of issues.

Laptops are small and portable. While it is possible to steal a desktop PC, it is harder. Especially if you've got some kind of security on the premises. Not impossible, but harder. Laptops, on the other hand, are routinely toted from one place to another...they could easily be nabbed out of your car, off your shoulder, off a chair at the library/terminal/cafe. Laptops are genuinely easier to physically steal.

A desktop is easier to consistently back up, since it is generally connected to the network at all times. You can easily use a utility of some sort to pull data off that desktop PC whenever it is necessary. A laptop could very easily be off the network for days at a time. Sure, you can use some kind of VPN or web access to anything important...but what if they have no bandwidth at all? Keeping data safe and backed up is more of an issue with a laptop.

And while we're on the topic of VPNs and bandwidth... Your average desktop doesn't leave the building - it stays on your network with your security/antivirus/whatever in place at all times. Laptops often wind up on somebody else's network. Maybe they're grabbing free bandwidth at a hotspot somewhere...maybe they're using the hotel's bandwidth...maybe they've got a cellular modem... Regardless, they're no longer behind your firewall, and are now at the mercy of whoever set up the network they're using.

You claim that desktop HDDs fail just as often as those in laptops... I'm not going to debate that, I have no data either way... But I doubt if desktops get knocked off tables, dropped, tripped over, or have crap spilled into them nearly as much as laptops do. Again, laptops are portable, people are carrying them around. People drop things, trip, fall down, slip. By contrast, a desktop is generally stuck under/on your desk and doesn't really go anywhere. Sure, you might have damage to a mouse or keyboard from time to time...but those are just peripherals. You aren't terribly likely to do serious damage to your CPU/motherboard/HDD if you spill coffee into your keyboard on a desktop.

The fact that laptops are portable, routinely leave your building, and connect to other networks makes them uniquely troublesome.

Re:Laptops

[jollyreaper]

Part of the issue is that people demand laptops when they don't need them. They do have the attractiveness of not having cords or other extraneous things that confuse users, but at the same time, being mobile is oftentimes not the best practice. Security is a major issue - can you trust that your data won't be compromised if lost or stolen? Do you have a reasonable backup? (Most people don't) For most employees, a desktop is often enough. And if laptops are handed out, then users need to be very, very careful. (Encrypt data, daily backups...) I'm thinking a better solution would have a laptop that works as a dumb terminal. My last job was like that, anyone who needed to work from home got a laptop. Of course, these same simps never bothered to make time to get training on how to work from home with IT. In fact, the rationale for the purchases was never run by us, we were just told to make it so. These people all had desktops at home and fast connections, they could have just used the terminal server to log in instead. They were either working at home or working at work, there was rarely ever a location C involved. Only a few people ever truly required a laptop because they could be any of a dozen places. For the most part, laptops encouraged poor data security practices, not so much fear that they would lose the data to a thief but that they would lose the data with no backups maintained on our servers. No matter how many user-invisible techniques I tried to make this simple, they never seemed to work, always making things more complicated than before. We would send out directives telling people that they should not store things locally but again, nobody ever listened. Every time I went to help someone directly I'd check their my documents and tell them they shouldn't be doing that and they wouldn't listen. I tried remapping my documents to point to the public file store and they'd end up saving things to the desktop instead. We had at least three serious "oh shits!" when hard drives in laptops failed and a lot of important info was lost.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Likewise, you can lead a man to ponder but you can't make him think. You can also lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.

Re:Laptops

[John Courtland]

You mean the Clit mouse?

Sys Admins complain! News at 11!

[sTalking_Goat]

So what? Network administration has only gotten more complicated since the beginning of the profession. Is this really news?

More upgradeability

[SeaFox]

I know this is going to increase thickness a bit, but having upgradeable graphics cards would be nice. Same with optical drives. I know there's a couple laptops where the graphics are on a daughtercard pretty much, but until it becomes a more commonplace feature with a standard interface, there wont be an industry/market of new cards for laptops like there are for desktops.

Re:More upgradeability

[syncrotic]

You can't just throw a graphics chip into a laptop as an afterthought: the entire machine has to be designed around the thermal profile of both the CPU and the GPU. Given how marginal laptop cooling systems are, an increase of 5W in GPU power output might be enough to overheat the system.

A laptop really isn't designed to be upgradeable - the good ones, especially so. They're integrated systems, carefully engineered for structural strength and heat dissipation. The only laptops that could accomodate a modular graphics interface are the cheap 17" ABS monsters.

their list

[mincognito]

1. Battery life still bombs.
2. Laptops get banged up and broken.
3. They're tough to fix, and they die young.
4. They get lost.
5. They're difficult to secure, digitally and physically ...
6. ... and security precautions make users nuts.
7. Wi-Fi is still the Wild, Wild West.
8. Laptops spawn a new breed of uber-entitled user.
9. They're too big or too small.
10. Software performance just ain't the same.

Re:their list

[Belial6]

"8. Laptops spawn a new breed of uber-entitled user."

This complaint is exactly why the rest of the complaints have to be seriously questioned. By that standard PCs spawn a new breed of uber-entitled user. I mean really, people expect the programs to run NOW? Having their application sit in a queue for a week to get the results just doesn't seem to fly anymore. What kind of uber-entitled user doesn't understand that there requests should sit in a queue until a time slot becomes available on the mainframe? If we allow employees to expect their job to be facilitated, the next thing you know, employees will start expecting telephones at their desks, photocopiers, pens and paper. Heck it might even get so bad that they might start expecting electric lighting or bathrooms!

As an IT Manager, only one signifcant problem...

[Kris_J]

As an IT Manager, there's only one bad thing that's particular to laptops that significant enough to be comment-worthy. They're a vector for virus infection. Everything else an IT department can just get on with, but the high virus risk associated with devices that regularly travel in and out of the firewalled company network merits pointing out.

One day, some place I work, I want to set up a DMZ for laptops.

Re:input device?

[MikeFM]

What's worse is accidental use of the stupid touch pad. You're typing along and zoom your cursor goes flying somewhere crazy and you've just deleted something important or done something equally as horrible. Touch pads are horrible devices.

Shorter Lifespan

[dfm3]

In my brief experience with IT at a small university several years ago, I learned that laptops have a much shorter expected lifespan in the real world compared to desktops- two years versus four or five before they need to be replaced. Even if users treat them like their firstborn, they just aren't designed to last much longer than that. Out of the half dozen or so laptops that we have floating around the office that are over 2 years old, not one of them has a battery that lasts for more than 15 minutes off of AC.

Portable desktop

[phorm]

Most people I know (myself included) tend to use laptops as more of a "portable desktop." Perhaps if we dump the batteries we could add more cooling and - in general - get more use out of them for that purpose?

At the same time, I've seen various different models of power bricks, but I much prefer the ones that attach to the laptop snugly rather than the standard rounded barrel-connector. Perhaps something that clicks into place but isn't a pain to remove (because without batteries, it would suck to accidentally knock out that easily-disconnected power jack).

Re:input device?

[yokem_55]

Try running syndaemon on your login. This little program is included with the synaptics X driver and it disables the touch pad while you are typing and reenables it automaticaly after a specified timeout (I have mine set to 2 seconds).

My problems with laptops

[FranTaylor]

My problems with laptops:

1. They are too fragile.
2. The internal guts are too hard to work with. Anything more than a RAM upgrade is a nightmare of tiny screws and shielding tape.
3. Operating systems are targeted for desktops and servers, they don't make it easy to set up a laptop the way you want, with encrypted partitions, network configuration, etc. Sure these features are there for the tinkering, but I don't want to mess around, I just want to get to work.
4. Laptop hard drives are so slow! You would think there could be a slightly larger drive form factor that would allow for a drive whose speed approaches that of a standard hard drive.
5. The batteries are all different. Hard drives, RAM, etc. are interchangeable to some extent, why not batteries?
6. Those tiny little laptop cooling fans drive me batty. I really hate the high-pitched whine.
7. While I appreciate the small size, I would gladly trade a pound or so and a quarter inch of thickness for less whiney fans and a faster hard drive. If it's too big to fit in my pocket, it should be a real computer.
8. Not much to be done about it, but it's not possible to use one in comfort; the ergonomics inherently suck.

Re:My problems with laptops

[Rakishi]

1. They are too fragile. So are desktops if you tried carrying them around and throwing them about.

2. The internal guts are too hard to work with. Anything more than a RAM upgrade is a nightmare of tiny screws and shielding tape. So? Very, very few people do upgrades on their computers nowadays. They may build them from parts but aside from the hard drive and ram "upgrade" means getting a whole new system (motherboard, cpu, video card, etc.). Technology changes too quickly and parts are not that backwards compatible. For most people messing with the inside of their computer is simply a waste of time, both techies and non-techies.

3. Operating systems are targeted for desktops and servers, they don't make it easy to set up a laptop the way you want, with encrypted partitions, network configuration, etc. Sure these features are there for the tinkering, but I don't want to mess around, I just want to get to work. So you want to mess with the hardware but not the software? Anyway, everything requires tinkering if you want it to do what you want. You're simply used to doing things ones way (and setting them up) on a desktop.

4. Laptop hard drives are so slow! You would think there could be a slightly larger drive form factor that would allow for a drive whose speed approaches that of a standard hard drive. ...when was the last time you even saw a laptop 1995???? Laptop hard drives are 7200, guess what desktop hard drives are? 7200.

5. The batteries are all different. Hard drives, RAM, etc. are interchangeable to some extent, why not batteries? Because manufacturers have nothing to gain from it and battery sizes vary a lot.

6. Those tiny little laptop cooling fans drive me batty. I really hate the high-pitched whine. So get a laptop with a large fan.

7. While I appreciate the small size, I would gladly trade a pound or so and a quarter inch of thickness for less whiney fans and a faster hard drive. If it's too big to fit in my pocket, it should be a real computer. I repeat my previous point "...when was the last time you even saw a laptop 1995????"

8. Not much to be done about it, but it's not possible to use one in comfort; the ergonomics inherently suck. It's called a docking bay with external monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Best new feature (from IT's POV)

[PPH]

Would be a heavy chain attached to an eye bolt welded to the office floor.

Or, whatever else it takes these things from wandering off the property. They get stolen along with data that shouldn't leave the property in the first place. Or taken home where the kids can goof around on the 'net with them and get them all infected with crap that mom/dad subsequently bring back inside the company firewall.

Re:As an IT Manager, only one signifcant problem..

[rnswebx]

This really isn't much of an issue if you don't give your users admin rights. I used to work for a company who's name represents a really long river and we weren't given admin rights on our laptops. (I was a system engineer)

At first, I hated it and even more I just hated the idea of not controlling my own machine. In the end though, it really came down to them providing me everythingI needed. If I wanted something that wasn't already installed and pertinent to me doing my job, it was almost instantly handled and installed over the intranet via what I can only guess were custom tools.

It's give and take with the portability that laptops provide. OK Joe User, you can go do your work from home, but in exchange for that we need to, among other things, take precautions that you won't be bringing in viruses to our network.

The key ingredient to my successful situation in such an environment was the capability of the supporting IT team. Without a very solid support team, I think the users would become frustrated with not being able to either install their own apps, or have the support staff provide a way to get them installed.

Food for thought at the very least.

From the My Computer Is My Monitor Dept.

[Strange Ranger]

> What would you like to see in the next generation of laptop computers?"

One thing I'd love to see is a little modularity and separation between the computer and the screen.
I want a strong hinge that can be disconnected with a simple everyday tool.
And at least within the same manufacturer, make it standard, the only variables being the size and resolution of the screen.
What a great idea to be able to replace only the half of the laptop that is broken or upgrade only the half that needs to be upgraded.
Reduce waste, reduce downtime, save money.

Is there something intrinsically magical about the screen hinge and graphics connection of a laptop that keeps them forever joined lest ye ship them back to the vendor?

Re:How 'bout this?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Option for no OS? Good idea. I understand VMWare is going to offer a bootable hypervisor supplied on a thumb drive this month, and also heard that Dell, IBM, and HP (I think) are going to offer a hypervisor in mobo firmware so you can boot up into a virtual environment just like our servers can now. I would really prefer that sort of arrangement to multi boot, so I can keep my debian, ubuntu, xp etc. experiences separate but simultaneously available without the underhead of an OS. Intel and AMD are offering CPUs than vector tier0 instructions off to use the hypervisor without all having to hit the BIOS at once to respond to IO interrupts, too -- this would make a laptop incredibly powerful, fast, simple, and useful.

Where do you want to go today? Gee, I don't know -- let's try this land called Ubuntu, sounds exotic. (Click.) Now that's windowing.

Re:Clunky but cramped.

[jamesh]

At least one manufacturer makes an adapter that will split a (eg) 2048x768 signal into 2 x 1024x768 separate signals to drive two monitors. That's the solution that some of our clients are using to get 3 displays. You need a bit of smarts on the O/S itself to treat the one screen as two, but once you do that it works well.

I agree with you about two screens being a minimum though. The attraction for me isn't so much the screen size, it's having two distinct workspaces. A 30" single screen probably wouldn't be as nice for the stuff I do as two 15" screens is.

Video In

[lymond01]

I'd like to be able to carry my laptop to the server room and hook up a VGA input so I can view what's on the server's screen without either purchasing a KVM or lugging in a full external monitor. Sort of like a temporary slave function (or just a F-key that allows video in...I'm not all that bothered about the keyboard and mouse).

A virtual keypad (like one of those you can lay down in front of you) plugged into your virtual eyewear (that projects the screen onto your eye) would be a nice space-saver too. Everything wireless, computer the size of an iPod in your pocket.

Mods on crack again!

[rts008]

Why were you modded offtopic?

From the summary:
"What would you like to see in the next generation of laptop computers?"

Ask and ye shall receive!

Personally, my tastes (and needs for a laptop) are really different from yours, as I still am in love with my Sharp MMC20- think the size of a Playboy magazine, and quite light to boot.

But if I had the budget, Oh Yeah! Gaming laptop here I come!
So I see where you are coming from, and think your post was ONTOPIC, my own needs drive me the opposite direction....but so what?

Your needs/wants in a laptop are are valid as anyone else's, and you answered the submitter's question. WTF?

Moderators take note: At least RTFS or RTFA before blasting out offtopic mods!

Missing the point

[L.Bob.Rife]

IT is part of a business. Making IT's job harder in that business costs money. The article is making the point that there are some pretty serious cons about using laptops, and these need to be considered as part of their cost.

The inseperable hinge

[The Conductor]

Is there something intrinsically magical about the screen hinge and graphics connection of a laptop that keeps them forever joined

Yes, and it will only get worse in the upcoming years. One of the many constraints in laptop design is routing the cables through the hinge. You have a back light and its control, and all the crazy data & clock lines (not analog video) for the LCD display. Now with WLAN you have co-axial cable, since since real-world experience has shown that locating the antenna up high is worth the cable losses. The trend is to put more stuff up there, like webcams, where the machine can see, and the microphone, further from those fans whose noise everyone is complaining about in posts here. And more antennas, for WWAN, TV, DVB, UWB, blah, blah, blah.

Re:As an IT Manager, only one signifcant problem..

[Thumper_SVX]

Ergo, if you have to manage laptops, do not allow the user to install software and they can't install VMWare.

This isn't rocket science, really. You just have to prioritize what you want to do, and provide the tools your users need without giving them the keys to the kingdom.

I personally do not manage PC's any more... I moved on to the server side of the house but let me relate to you how things work where I work.

I have a laptop, and I use it since I'm on-call one week in 6. I do not have admin rights to my laptop... in fact I'm as locked down a user as everyone else is. However, despite my initial bad feeling about this, I have had few if any problems. Quite simply, our desktop support team uses SMS to distribute updates and software to the end user in a packaged form. That way, we can control who has what software simply because some of them require passwords to install which are requested on an ad-hoc basis. Every piece of software I need to do my job including software like Putty is out there under "Run Advertised Programs". I just click the software I need, click install and within a minute or two my software's installed even if I'm on a VPN.

What about tools like VMWare Server? Well, we have that in RAP as well... but that's strictly limited to people who sign an agreement with the desktop group about responsible behavior, and we don't build arbitrary XP boxes. VM's built on our systems are audited by a script pushed by group policy, so the desktop group can spot an arbitrary XP desktop a mile off. Yes, they have alerts... yes, those logs are put in a database... yes, in the event that I put arbitrary OSs on my system I could be disciplined by HR by the terms of the agreement I signed with my desktop folks.

So what about admin tools I need? OK... ever used Citrix? We have a section of our farm dedicated to our UNIX, SQL and Windows admins that provides all those tools for us to use in an admin job; Windows admin tools and so forth. This also has the advantage that our performance of admin tasks even on a slow VPN can be similar to working at the office.

Sure, I'm not totally locked down... and I have a different account in the Active Directory that I use to authenticate to servers; a so-called Admin account. If I want to connect to a share with admin privileges all I need is a command prompt and a "net use \\server /user:adminaccount" and I can connect to the shares with my admin privileges. My desktop group grants me that because of my job... all it took was for me to sign that "privileged operations" agreement that also allowed me VMware Server on my laptop.

Sound like a bit of a pain, but trust me... I don't want to be troubleshooting desktop problems all the time. I want to focus on my job; keeping the lights on in the datacenter. If my laptop shoots crap, I want to be able to pick up the phone and have someone else responsible for my not being able to do my job... or provide me an alternate way to get my job done. If I had admin rights to my laptop, I'd probably fix it myself... and the one time I've had problems with my laptop I actually had a good idea of the problem. But you know what? Because of that I was able to pick up the phone, call our desktop folks, explain precisely what the problem was and they were able to fix it within minutes because no troubleshooting was required... and they trust me since I'm also a professional Windows guy.

See, in my opinion the people who cry about not having admin rights to their machines are the same people who sit in the basement and refuse to talk to anyone else. Me, I'd rather have my rights taken away to my laptop so I can just focus on MY job... not someone else's. It makes me more productive, and allows me to defer responsibility when stuff goes wrong with my laptop. Hell, even when I ordered upgraded RAM I let the desktop folks do it... I put components in servers every other day, but I figured that I have better things to do with my time than figure out where all the screws are to get to