That was the LAN administrator messing up. Software is best loaded from the local hard drive. One of my summer students was working her second year in a different section and noted that Wordperfect took far longer to load than it did when working for me. The problem was the LAN Admin didn't understand that LAN speeds are measured in bits per second and hard drive access in bytes per second. Add in contention as multiple people try to load software at the same time and the LAN gets flooded you can't get more than 40% throughput if you try you get more collisions and throughput drops. I had a chat and the summer student who had worked with me previously she studied English sorted tho LAN out and how software was loaded.
Cheerio John
Whatever the cause, its been the same in every place I've worked in ,taking up to 10 minutes for a PC to boot up and load.
the Macs were used for video, audio, 3d work and photography and the PC'S mostly for CAD and photography. Part of the problem when video editing on a network in education is that the video files you create ( often huge ) need to be stored so the user AND others working on the project can access the work. in all the windows networks I've used ( in education ) their security is placed into a higher status than the user experience, so when using the network to store the work, only one user can access a project. if that person is not present the work cannot be accessed. Also bandwidth for uncompressed video is huge and thus most institutions just don't have it.The network bottlenecks within seconds and you cannot import to the software program . Thus the need to be able to import directly to the hard drive not the central server. I've only seen this done at all on PC's in one campus and it did not work well overall because only the logged on user themselves could access the files. .
The software on all the computers was the same across campus . The entire adobe creative suite, and office and a few other smaller programs. There was Autocad and 3d max on the PCs and on the Macs there was Final Cut Pro , IMovie, Motion 5, Logic and Carrara 3d. plus a huge amount of fonts and sound effects that were not used on the pc's so it more or less was about even software load . The macs had all of this software on their hard drives, so it was available on bootup , they were both standalone and networked whereas the windows machines were only networked.
The point is, the macs could be used as stand alones because its extremely difficult to mess them up so badly they cannot be used even with a generic login , whereas the windows units could not be set up like that ( for whatever reason the IT guys had ) and when being used by a group this was a real issue. We could never set up video editing correctly on the network with Windows. the macs worked out the box for this and other media tasks and saved us many thousands of dollars in tech time thereby justifying their purchase, for whatever reason they lasted two years longer, even though they were only core duos and the windows machines were quad cores. Both types of computer had about equal use although the macs were used by fewer staff who possibly looked after them more than the others did ( against vandalism ).
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