Students attending ULM pay for only the best technology to be at their disposal to study and to accomplish work assigned to them by their teachers.

Does anyone consider the faculty members of the university when it comes to how up-to-date their office supplies are?

As of right now, the students of ULM are able to use computers that are fairly new. Each has the OS Windows 7 hardware and, more importantly, just about all computers have Microsoft Office 365.

What’s so special about this is that, with a subscription, you are given a cloud you can store documents on, so you can access them from any computer with 365, instead of having to carry around a flash drive.

From observing the faculty and the hardware they have to use, computers with Windows XP seem to be the popular choice for this university to keep, rather than upgrading.

It’s cheaper to postpone upgrading and not worry about losing too much productivity.

This way of saving money could prove to be a choice that costs the university more than just dollars. Why? Because these computer programs are soon not going to be compatible with the OS.

It costs too much time, effort, and money to create programs compatible with out-of-date hardware when the most used and available OS right now, for most, is Vista and Windows 7.

ULM has a good amount of computers with Windows XP, which scares me since productivity will come to a crawl when a new software update comes out. A lot of the computers will not be able to run it because they’re not optimized for it.

Now, since the last time I have observed the university’s technology, they have improved on it, allowing the staff to not fall so behind the times.

In November, the library was able to give the old student computers to ULM faculty members to allow them to at least upgrade to less dated computers, since brand new ones weren’t available.

With these computers being old, it is not exactly a glorious transition. Some of them have been running for over a decade, but they’re not running on Windows XP.

Instead they are running on either Vista or, if the university staff is lucky, Windows 7 and have probably only been in service for the past couple years.

It’s nice to see that, while it is not a huge change, it still allows the faculty to keep up their productivity and not have to put such a strain on the university’s already stretched wallet.