While RWC students and faculty were enjoying the break prior to the start of fall quarter, the campus computers were upgraded. According to Rene Barnett with Network Resources, 355 new Dell GX620 desktop computers with Office Professional 2003 were installed in RWC computer labs. All computers have a 17-inch flat panel monitor. They also have Pentium 4 processors with 3.4GHz and 2.0 GB of memory and a 160 GB hard drive. With this upgrade, zip drives or floppy drives are no longer available on the new computers. However, each tower has a DVD +/- RW drive and two external USB ports for use with flash drives. Barnett said that, with these upgrades, the new computers are much faster than before and therefore a great improvement.
These 355 new computers can be found in the library, the Computer Concourse (M112A and M112B), M210, M213, and M349. The Science Lab and instructor stations in SAHB also have upgrades, including the Blue Ash Elementary School Lab. In Muntz, the Foreign Language Lab, media carts, student testing stations in Disability Services, smart classrooms, and the Networking Lab in M265 also received upgrades.
The old computers were “recycled” to upgrade faculty and staff office computers.
The Computer Concourse is open Monday-Thursday 8 a.m.-10 p.m., Friday 8 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m. The computer concourse is closed on all university holidays and during quarter breaks. No food or drink is allowed at any time in the Concourse or in computer classrooms.