Prioritising a shared school computer laboratory upgrade
A secondary school in Oshana runs one computer laboratory for 620 learners. The lab has 24 desktop PCs: eight are ten-year-old dual-core machines with 2 GB RAM, and sixteen are five-year-old machines with 4 GB RAM; all use 500 GB hard drives and Windows 10. Both classes and the coding club use the lab, and the school also keeps learner records on a teacher's PC acting as a file server. Staff report that logging in can take six minutes, several machines fail to start after power cuts, and learners lose unsaved work when the room's temperature reaches 34 °C. The antivirus licence expired last term. The school has N$75,000 for this year. Local quotes are: 4 GB RAM upgrade N$500 per PC, 500 GB SSD N$850 per PC, new entry-level PC N$8,000, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the lab N$15,000, and air conditioning N$12,000. The principal wants a plan that improves reliability before buying more computers.
1. Recommend how the N$75,000 should be prioritised. Give a short budget and justify each choice using the symptoms in the setup.
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Priority should follow the causes of data loss and downtime, not raw speed. A defensible plan:
- UPS N$15,000. Power cuts are already causing failed starts and lost work; a UPS protects all 24 machines and the server for short outages.
- Air conditioning N$12,000. 34 °C increases disk and CPU failures and shortens hardware life; without it, new disks will also fail.
- SSDs for the 16 newer PCs: 16 × N$850 = N$13,600. These machines have enough RAM and CPU to benefit; SSDs reduce boot and program load times and are less sensitive to movement than hard drives.
- RAM upgrade for the eight older PCs: 8 × N$500 = N$4,000. 2 GB is too little for Windows 10 and a browser; 4 GB avoids constant disk swapping. However, the dual-core CPU remains a bottleneck, so this is a temporary fix. Subtotal = N$44,600. Remaining N$30,400: replace two oldest PCs (2 × N$8,000 = N$16,000), renew antivirus and backup media (about N$4,000), and keep about N$10,400 contingency. The answer is not to spend the whole budget on new PCs: that would leave the power and heat faults untouched, so new machines would fail too.
2. A parent suggests buying 24 SSDs and no UPS because 'SSDs make computers faster'. Explain why this would not solve the lab's main reliability problems.
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SSDs improve read and write speed, so boot and application launch may be faster. But the symptoms include machines failing after power cuts, unsaved work lost at high temperature, six-minute logins when the server is involved, and expired antivirus. SSDs do not provide power during a cut; a sudden loss of power can still corrupt files and the file system. They do not cool the room; high temperature shortens the life of SSDs and CPUs too. They do not fix a server bottleneck: if login validation and profiles are on one teacher's PC, all 24 machines can wait on that one device. They do not stop malware when antivirus is expired. Spending N$20,400 on 24 SSDs would use over a quarter of the budget and leave the main causes. The parent's suggestion may make an individual PC feel faster, but reliability requires UPS, cooling, backup and server attention first.
3. Describe a backup routine the school should put in place before any upgrade, including what, where, how often, and how restore would be tested.
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Back up the file server and any local data before changes. Use the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two media, one off-site. Example: daily automatic backup to an external hard drive kept in the office, plus a weekly encrypted copy to a cloud account or a drive taken to the principal's office. Back up learner records and the server configuration, not only user documents. Keep at least four weekly and twelve monthly versions so a corrupted file is not copied over every good version. Test restore monthly by restoring a sample folder to a spare PC and opening files; record the date and result. Before the upgrade, take a full image of the server and label it. During the upgrade, stop staff from saving to the server. After the upgrade, verify that permissions and shared folders still work. Assign one staff member to check the backup log weekly; a backup that has never been restored is only a hope.