Lenovo ThinkPad X130e first glance

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The new Lenovo ThinkPad X130e laptop just arrived in my office today. I’ve been hearing great things from Lenovo about this unit, and how it’s 100% built around school environments. So far it appears to be built like a tank. I have hit the screen fairly hard with my fist, but the Corning Gorilla Glass deflected the blows. The rubber bumpers protected it from a 4-foot fall onto the floor. I think this can take all of the rigors of a school environment. Stay tuned.

http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x130e-intel/

BYOT for Adult Education?

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We have started looking into BYOT (bring your own technology) for our Adult Education students. During the last orientation session, we asked for a show of hands who would prefer to use their own computer rather than one we provide and charge them for. About 3/4 of the students would prefer to use their own device. That was far more students than we had anticipated, and feel that we should start looking into BYOT for them.

It’s interesting hearing other schools planning for BYOT who don’t have a 1 to 1 program already, and all of the things they are needing to consider. It’s been 7 years since we were at that point, and I’ve forgotten how much there is to plan for. Simply adding a BYOT option to a 1 to 1 program feels like picking a paint color rather than building a house.

Good luck to all schools planning a BYOT project, there is a ton of planning to do!

Daily walkthroughs with Google Apps and the iPad

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I have to give Chris Lehmann credit for this post. I was thinking of ways that our High School Directors could incorporate their iPads into their daily walkthroughs. Chris took what I was thinking of a step further. Here is the post:

http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1261-Daily-Walkthroughs-with-GoogleApps-and-the-iPad.html

While you are there, Chirs has some other great posts on his blog!

Product review of Toshiba Portege R700

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I’ve been asked to write a product review of the new Toshiba Portege R700 laptop. I’ve seen quite a few laptops over the last several years with our 1:1 laptop program, but this thing is amazing! It sports a 13.3″ screen, 8 hours of battery life, a DVD drive, and weighs in around 3 pounds. When you pop the battery out, it literally cuts the weight in half. First impressions are very promising!Toshiba Portege R700

Dont need to re-image MacBooks over the summer

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Every summer since we started our laptop program, my department spends a week or two (or has summer help) re-imaging the returning student computers. We have done this because the Windows machines have been so junked up and needed to be cleaned up. We simply don’t have that problem with the MacBooks. We will need to run software updates, and maybe install a couple applications, but we can use ARF for that.

That being said, we still may re-image them simply because we are making some changes to our master image. The point is, we don’t NEED to re-image them.

How to free up disk space on Windows 2008 Server

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I recently had built a new server with a 32 GB OS volume, and the system had a considerable amount of RAM. I noticed that I was rather low on disk space but couldn’t find the culprit due to Windows UAC. In doing some digging, I found that hiberfil.sys was consuming over 12GB of disk space. Deleting the file is not as easy as you would think. There is a command that you need to run to disable the hibernation system:

powercfg -h off

This also should make my backups a little faster as well. I hope this helps!