At this point, if a student brings in a laptop, explains what doesn’t work, and leaves me to diagnose and fix it, I consider it a good report because it means that the student didn’t get any overconfident ideas. If a student also explains what they were doing when a thing failed, I’m giving them preferential treatment.
Then there are comp-sci students who attempted something. I had one who disassembled their laptop and tore a ribbon cable. I had one who plugged in a random mis-matched RAM stick that turned out to be busted and wondered why Windows kept crashing. I had one who completely fucked up the registry. I had one who wanted to install Ubuntu for dual booting and accidentally wiped the entire SSD.
I would rather spend an hour babysitting their computers than an entire afternoon un-fucking something they thought they could handle. If it were up to me, I would restrict the crap out of their user accounts, but the faculty leaders insist, against empirical evidence, that they’re smart enough.
but the faculty leaders insist, against empirical evidence, that they’re smart enough.
To be fair, you’re only seeing the dumb ones.
If that user-installed RAM stick had worked, they wouldn’t have come to you about it.
If they had installed their dual boot Ubuntu setup correctly, they wouldn’t come to you about it.
Presumably, there are a lot of smart students out there fucking with their laptops without breaking them, which you never know about because they never bring those laptops to you to fix. And locking down the computers would prevent those smart students from being able to do the things they want.
I guess I forgot to point out (six months ago, well done) that these are free loaners provided by the university. Usually high-end, current-generation hardware. They can be smart on their own devices, that’s neither my concern nor my responsibility, but these are not theirs to disembowel.
In any case I do not mind so much the “I should try to fix this on my own first”. If it’s your own device and accept the risks/consequences. But if it is a work/university provided laptop then it makes no sense to attempt to fix it on one’s own.
I can feel your pain trying to fix/repair something you have to figure out what kind of stupid stuff was done to the device.
They’re provided by the faculties at the university’s expense, but the students have admin rights and very little supervision. Two fairly expensive laptops have been stolen by exchange students during the three years I’ve worked there – they simply never bothered to return them, and we only realized it during the yearly inventory check. But fixing the asset tracking system (or implementing one in the first place) is not what I’m getting paid for.
I’m more surprised that your school doesn’t go by the “Wipe and reimage” policy. Most every school now uses some form of cloud service. No reason to spend time troubleshooting when you can just do a stock image and have the student sign in again
At this point, if a student brings in a laptop, explains what doesn’t work, and leaves me to diagnose and fix it, I consider it a good report because it means that the student didn’t get any overconfident ideas. If a student also explains what they were doing when a thing failed, I’m giving them preferential treatment.
Then there are comp-sci students who attempted something. I had one who disassembled their laptop and tore a ribbon cable. I had one who plugged in a random mis-matched RAM stick that turned out to be busted and wondered why Windows kept crashing. I had one who completely fucked up the registry. I had one who wanted to install Ubuntu for dual booting and accidentally wiped the entire SSD.
I would rather spend an hour babysitting their computers than an entire afternoon un-fucking something they thought they could handle. If it were up to me, I would restrict the crap out of their user accounts, but the faculty leaders insist, against empirical evidence, that they’re smart enough.
To be fair, you’re only seeing the dumb ones.
If that user-installed RAM stick had worked, they wouldn’t have come to you about it.
If they had installed their dual boot Ubuntu setup correctly, they wouldn’t come to you about it.
Presumably, there are a lot of smart students out there fucking with their laptops without breaking them, which you never know about because they never bring those laptops to you to fix. And locking down the computers would prevent those smart students from being able to do the things they want.
I guess I forgot to point out (six months ago, well done) that these are free loaners provided by the university. Usually high-end, current-generation hardware. They can be smart on their own devices, that’s neither my concern nor my responsibility, but these are not theirs to disembowel.
Are these laptops provided by the faculty?
In any case I do not mind so much the “I should try to fix this on my own first”. If it’s your own device and accept the risks/consequences. But if it is a work/university provided laptop then it makes no sense to attempt to fix it on one’s own.
I can feel your pain trying to fix/repair something you have to figure out what kind of stupid stuff was done to the device.
They’re provided by the faculties at the university’s expense, but the students have admin rights and very little supervision. Two fairly expensive laptops have been stolen by exchange students during the three years I’ve worked there – they simply never bothered to return them, and we only realized it during the yearly inventory check. But fixing the asset tracking system (or implementing one in the first place) is not what I’m getting paid for.
I’m more surprised that your school doesn’t go by the “Wipe and reimage” policy. Most every school now uses some form of cloud service. No reason to spend time troubleshooting when you can just do a stock image and have the student sign in again