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Microsoft Debuts New Low-Cost Laptops and 'Classroom Pen' For Schools (geekwire.com)
Microsoft is doubling down on the education market, a competitive arena for the world's largest tech giants, with a series of new low-cost laptops and tools to help students and teachers work together. From a report: At the BETT education conference in London Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled seven new laptops and two-in-one tablets made by partners like Lenovo, Dell and Acer and a new Microsoft Classroom Pen designed for the smaller hands of kids. Starting at $189, the low-cost devices are designed to stand up to tough treatment of being dragged around in a backpack everyday. The seven new devices showcased today are: Lenovo 100e -- priced from $189, Lenovo 300e (2-in-1) -- priced from $289, Lenovo 14w -- priced from $299, Acer TravelMate B1(B118-M) -- priced from $215, Acer TravelMate Spin B1 (B118-R/RN) -- priced from $299, Acer TravelMate B1-114 -- priced from $319, and Dell Latitude 3300 for Education -- priced from $299. The pen is priced at $40.
The hardware looks nice, but I would like to opt-out from Microsoft indoctrination...
Can I run Linux on these (or any of the BSDs for that matter, even MacOS-X would be better)? Otherwise, they're just baggage my kid doesn't need.
I always wish this "first hit is free" shit was true. You could just wander around from dealer to dealer getting free cocaine.
While there's been a number of articles touting the benefits of technology in the classroom, the disadvantages are immense and not worth the investment That's why, pupils from the so called 3rd world thrive when they come over to "technologically advanced" classroom environments. They demonstrate an understanding of the academics better.
This leads me to one conclusion: Nothing beats the old fashioned [pen and paper] way of learning.
Microsoft cannot agree with me on this. Heck, they want to sell more and more gadgets. They want to make money, and lots of it. I will point those who support technology to debunk this piece
You'll shoot your nose off kid.
For our business, I've had to test out low-end Win10 machines to work with our software. I've been generally surprised at how sluggish these laptops (2-4GB DDR and 32-64GByte SSD) come up as well as bring up and run applications. Will these computers offer better performance or do you really need a system with a 2+GHz clock and more than 5GB of DDR?
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I'm a teacher, I've taught at several school. Bay Area schools are transitioning from having computers available, to all students being issued one of these cheaper laptops. The hardware is basically irrelevant for students. Literally the only thing students do on their computers is open a web browser, either for Google Office or for Google Classroom. Or to try to get away with gaming LOL. There is functionally no difference between Chromebooks and Windows.
Admins say the Google and Microsoft tools are fine (but that Mac admin is a pain in the butt). Microsoft has a hassle with frequent updates. If the students don't leave their computers on and plugged in over the weekend, they may have to run updates in the middle of class. However, that is a pretty rare thing, and hopefully just takes a minute or two. It's a pain, but it isn't poisonous.
A lot of the schools I've seen run Macs for yearbook or maybe a computer art class, and students may be issued Macbooks instead of cheap laptops. Annoying, because student-monitoring tools (whitelists/blacklists/etc.) don't work on the Macs. But of course, students doing high-end electives tend to be higher-end students who don't need re-direction to get them to stay off Fortnite.
Since the DOJ failed to breakup Microsoft despite its continuing abuses of the market, it would be great for a company like Amazon to take them on head on. I can see a subscription service that includes laptops bundled with LibreOffice in the classroom or company cubicles, and cloud servers.
Personally, I am quite impressed by how Chromebooks operate (not so pleased with Google's treatment of user data) but not so much when you get the same (literally) hardware running Win10 - I compared an Acer Chromebook with Win10 machine with identical specs, processors, etc. They were the same machine except the covers are different colours.
There seems to be a lot of bloat that keeps the Windows Machines from running at what I would consider a decent speed which is why I asked the question to see if there are any plans on improving the performance of these machines.
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Big-brand megacorps should have no access to children. We already know their agenda:
1) study the children's data and behavior (and keep it forever)
2) use what they learn to reduce market options and funnel more money to themselves
If schools are *so* desperate for technology, companies that want to win these contracts should be forced to erase all traces of branding from these devices. There should be no way to tell whether it was provided by MS or GOOGLE or AMAZON. The school should not be a goddamn billboard for these trashbag companies. Isn't it obvious they are not doing this out of genuine philanthropy? Why don't they provide free devices to the elderly? Or just anyone that needs one? This is standard playbook wolf-in-sheeps-clothing.
I don't see how you would use these things.
You will get one tab opened, and that will be it.
Maybe M$ just wants kids in their systems sooner and sooner.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Hundreds of students using Win10 devices, managed by some Active Directory server in the back end? Cost of sys admin, cost of server, cost of server security upgrades .... No wonder they are giving crap machines for free.
Win10 plays poorly on low end machines. I bought a cheap win10 for exclusive use as VPN work from home machine. That dog could not even manage that simple thing well. Amount of disk thrashing it does, ... 8 GB not enough to maintain a VPN connection and render the pixmap coming over the net? Utter crap. I disabled something called user experience telemetry. That stopped the disk thrashing, but speed is no better.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This just the same old same old. You have been able to pick up $200 laptops for years.
The problem is that they are practically unusable as they are very sluggish and have no space for anything.
They're just intended to be terminals limited to a walled-garden internet.
Schools would be far better off doing what they used to do which was has a computer lab and dedicated computer time on actual computers. Instead of trying to give every kid their own worthless device because that's all the school can afford.
One of the fundamental issues is families who don't recognize the importance of having a computer in the home since they can "use the internet on their phone."
It wasn't that long ago that families understood the importance of computers and made the effort to have one even if everyone had to share.
Bring back budget desktop PCs for the family room. That would be useful.
Work Safe Porn
Well it will at least once...
I hated that the industry got rid of netbooks. Let the cheap, small laptops return!
You're vastly oversimplifying Chrome Apps - our app (Jade Support https://chrome.google.com/webs...) is very full featured with Javascript based UI, WebAssembly Compilers and Bluetooth Communications. User data is from GDrive (and soon also to allow OneDrive) which uses up the bandwidth you're talking about.
But a lot of work is being done at the thin client level and it performs very well - especially when you compare it to Windows apps written in C++ doing the same function on a platform with the same processor, memory and storage.
Google got a lot right with Chromebooks and performance for apps (not just web pages) is one of them.
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These look like a rehash of the old Netbook PC's from the Mid 2000's. Cheap Low End laptops. They had limited success because the economy in 2008 was bad. So people needed a cheap device. However shortly after that with the growth of the iPhone and Android Competitors which offered strong competition people found that their mobile devices, could do the same thing as their netbooks could do, but actually better, because the software was written to work for the slower systems.
Now Google has success (in America) with the Chrome book. But these are not so much a Netbook but more of a thin client to google services. So it runs stuff in the cloud all the time.
The low end Microsoft Windows Laptop, still bring back all the problems with the Netbook. And it is worse now, because the PC is no longer really a Personal Computer, your mobile devices do that, they are more of a Personal Workstation which you want to do real work with. Thus you really need more power then the cheap netbooks can offer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
nt
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
and how long will the keyboard last?
I've gone through 2 cheap chromebooks because the keyboards wore out. Tried to replace one on a C720 with a $30 replacement and bricked the C720. Chromebooks are picky which OS they will boot if the battery is disconnected too long. Plastic rivets connect the keyboard to the case and removal of everything, including the motherboard is required to swap keyboards. Just sayin'.
Now I have a beautiful Toshiba CB35-C3550 (1080p, sub-3lbs, 10 hrs batt) with a Core i3 CPU, but about 6 keys stopped working. Again, have to remove everything inside the case to swap the keyboard. Parts are $100+. I figure a laptop expert could do the replacement in 30 minutes, so about $150-$200 to replace it. Think I'll get a 2-3 yr, used Dell with a 10 min keyboard replacement capability instead for $230.
Anyways, any cheap laptop I buy will need to have a user-replaceable keyboard for $30 or less.
Does anyone have any evidence that putting laptops in schools increases academic performance? I've been reading education & CogSci research for years & haven't found any yet. Before somebody says, "because 21st century skills!" Please tell me the difference between those & 3rd century BC skills.
I wonder how writing on the screen with a real pencil works???
"Doubling down"
Don't make it a thing; only presidents can double down anything, which makes it sound that they are doing something that only a talking head from Fox News can grasp.
Google it.
Is it Atom? If so I'll pass. Atom performance just sucks.
Ryzen APU please. When they come out later this year, then Ryzen 7nm APU please.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
They better lockdown and lo-jack the shit out of these computers, because they WILL be stolen and/or sold off.
Until they get the price point to no higher than 50 or 60 dollars, there will be trouble and woe with this.
In the meantime, little tykums can get along just fine with a paper pad and a pencil, and maybe a $20 scientific calculator.
Remember how we knew that the blonde had been using the word processor? ...White-out on the screen.
I wouldn't trust anything that is "low cost" from Microsoft. They will likely make up the difference by charging for future software updates, or by selling you a new computer once your current under-powered, low capacity machine is soon obsolete. One new feature of Windows Update is to reserve 7 GB of storage space for temporary files and for future updates since Microsoft admitted that it does not calculate how much storage space is needed for installing new updates leading to larger updates failing to install on some machines. But I have seen Windows laptops just two or three years old that were low cost and only shipped with a total of 32 GB of storage space, presumably to try to compete with Chromebooks. So Microsoft's idea of a low cost computer probably does not make much sense when it comes to saving money in the long run.
The advantages and disadvantages are numerous in technologically advanced environments for a classroom. I believe that the pros are more than cons. They demonstrate an understanding of the academics better.
This leads me to one conclusion: More advancement in the classroom will lead to learning in a short time.
I will also appreciate Microsoft for their role in the technology advancement. The homework, research papers for Students are on one go now.