There it is: the old familiar spinning wheel of death, with the polite request asking users to “Please Wait.”

Please Wait?

This loading screen seen, which displays itself on every school computer for minutes – or hours – at a time, is just another indication that it is time to replace the school’s original Computers On Wheels (COWS).

Luckily, the school just gained a new mass of computer laptops, all for the usage and availability for the students and teachers.

The school purchased six mobile COW units, which is the portable laptop cases that majority of English and foreign language classes receive. PHS decided to replace the Hewlett Packard Nc6320 with 80 Chromebooks and 120 HP EliteBook 9470m in the last school year and placed in the order last summer.

The overall cost between Chromebook and laptop varies, however the school was provided, “$100,00 last year to upgrade their technology…” Principal Dan Serrano stated.

This will not only help students to get their work done, but also teachers, who will  be able to run their classes more efficiently.

The benefit of these new laptops is very evident in comparison to their older versions, as many teachers also dreaded the use of these computers.

English 10th and 11th grade teacher Laura Varela concluded such annoyance by stating, “It wasn’t even worth the time, because by the time you got everybody logged on, it actually..was longer than our class time.”

Thankfully, the new computers offer many improvements.

IT Specialist Christine Gonzales concluded the major improvements, such as, “The speed on the laptops and Chromebooks…it took a lot of time to log into the old ones, we got a lot of complaints about lagging, and with these new laptops you do get the instance response onto your webpages.”

The difference between Chromebook and HP laptop is their primary applications.

For the Chromebooks, “it’s purely internet based, it’s going to be for research or if you are going to work on Word Documents, you’re going to be working on GoogleDocs, where as with the HP laptops EliteBooks, are able to hit our network, so if you have students folders you can save it there, you can print to our network printers,” Gonzales said.

With that, completing work will be simple, fast, and effective for every student and teacher.