Where the H is My Drive?

Where the H is my Drive?

By Nick Brady

The Radnor students are tired of being maters to their school’s unreliable computer network. All the students interviewed agreed the computers were “slow.” Max Victoria went so far as to describe them as “obsolete” and useless.” Common complaints included slowness and problems accessing the storage server knows as the “H: Drive.” There is no question that students are frustrated, but is it important enough for the school to devote time any money to fixing this?

The issue has bothered Radnor High students for years. Two seniors, Alie Somes and Liz Devenny recalled that the computers have been this way as long as they can remember.

“I’ve have problems where it says it saved…a week later it’s disappeared.”

The girls feel that computers problems are so common that teachers have to expect that it might take the whole class period for students to simply log in.

Sometimes the issues go even further then logging in. Curby Wasco, a junior, also had H: drive problems. “I don’t have an H drive, I don’t know where it is…never seen it.” Curby recalled that “last year I had an outline for history due, I could save it to the school computer…it was a huge fiasco…I ended up emailing it to my teacher.”

Junior Bobby Adams said he often has trouble logging in. He said the computers were “unreliable” and senior Erin Reid commented “I have trouble logging on every day.”

Max Victoria only came to Radnor in his sophomore year, but now—a year later—he already is sick of the computers.

“I had my Africa project on my H drive, lost my Africa project, and then had to turn it in late with a reduced score.”

In response to being asked if he thought better computers should be a school priority he promptly replied: “It should be a one number priority, in the 21st…its reductions we are not already there considering how much money this school has.”

Max felt the schools needed to reevaluate its priorities. Radnor has excellent Mac computers, but they happened to be in the art room “Core classes should come before electives” said Max. It is certainly frustrating to consider that the school certainly has means, but prefers to spend them on other things.

Cruby Wasco had similar feelings to Max, saying “I love the LM rally, but I think school work is more important…I’m not saying get rid of LM…[but] we need more computers before we have [other] lavish expenses.” It something for ever Radnor student to consider.

Dillon Avnet, another junior, passionately expressed his frustrating with the schools computers.

Harriton, one of Lower Merion’s two public high schools, has a different approach to computer. Each student has his or her own laptop, and the graduating seniors give theirs to the incoming freshmen. With a system like that, there is no need for a H:  Drive because every student has his or her files saved right to a hard drive.

All in all, the best compromise might be to improve the network. Just removing the long log in times might be enough. The Macs would be fascistic, but might take away too much from LM week. The majority of complaints centered around H drive problems and log in times. Computers can be slow once you get them started, but it is less of a problem. Hopefully the administration will listen to the students complaints, but until everybody is just going to have to stick it out with the status quo.