As things remain settled and the schools are running smoothly we are continuing with general background improvements to our network. We’ve just ordered new staff computers to continue our replacement cycle. We’ve recently made the switch to solid state drives for staff desktops (we’ve had SSDs in staff laptops for a while now), which really makes a significant difference to their performance. We’re also doubling their installed memory as the greater demands of today's workloads really require that. Fortunately, the prices of both these have fallen so we’re not paying any more that we usually have, despite a general rise in technology costs with recent tariffs.
We’re also still working on improving projectors in classrooms. While we still have old projectors on carts at the front of the room in quite a few middle school rooms those should be our priority for replacement. Unfortunately, we also have wall mounted Promethean projectors starting to fail at North Fork. While Promethean made a great interactive board, the projectors they supplied have not held up as well and so we’re slowly replacing those with our preferred Hitachi models. It takes a bit to switch mounts and configurations in these upgrades and we’re always grateful for the support of our maintenance department. They switched one out just before Thanksgiving for us, and we’ll plan to do some more over the winter break.