The best use for the laptop Elizabeth Bailey '04 bought through the Student Computer Initiative her freshman year may now be as a paperweight or doorstop.
"It's barely worth traveling with, and I know I can't write my JP or my thesis on it," she said. "The computer was worthless."
Bailey is one of several juniors and sophomores who are dissatisfied with the computers they bought through the school at the beginning of their freshman years.
While many students say their computers began acting up as early as January 2000, no investigation was undertaken until the USG began one this fall.
Last spring, class president Eli Goldsmith '04 and senator Brad Flora '04 both received unsolicited complaints about the IBM 1400-series laptops, the model that more than 650 students had purchased in 2000.
This fall Goldsmith emailed the junior class, asking them to send comments about these computers to Flora, who said he has received more than 100 complaints.
Of the students who contacted him, 80 reported power problems, between 20 and 30 complained of monitor issues and "one or two" said their computers had not worked at all straight out of the box, he said.
The number of email complaints came as a surprise to Luke Bodenstein, who took over the SCI program in October 2001, after the computers had been sold to incoming members of the Class of 2005, and long after the Class of 2004 bought theirs.
"That is not a satisfactory number as far as I'm concerned," he said, though it is not clear how many complaints were derived from hardware problems or user frustration with the machine.
"It goes without saying that if we are able to determine that IBM sold us a potentially faulty model then by all means they should be responsible for some sort of resolution," Bodenstein said.
IBM acknowledged the power problems on the 1400-series computers by issuing an Engineering Change Announcement, a directive which allowed hardware support to fix the power problems on that model even after the warranty period. But that coverage ended last month.
The computers sold to the Class of 2005 in the fall of 2001 have had their share of problems as well. Of 873 IBM T22s sold, 60 have needed hard drive replacements, said hardware support manager Adam Re. IBM employees seemed concerned about the problem when it was brought to their attention, he said.
Pam Stolzer '05 owned one of the T22s that suffered a hard drive failure. Less than two months after she bought it, the computer began to crash frequently and finally refused to start up.
At the recommendation of the helpdesk staff, she agreed to have them wipe her hard drive clean and write a new image to the drive.
They repeated this process twice more before the hard drive finally broke physically in May 2001, causing her to lose a paper during reading period. The hard drive was replaced and broke again in July, she said.
At this point, her father called an SCI manager to say that the computer was simply unacceptable and that his daughter had been without a working computer for much of the year. The manager arranged for Stolzer to purchase a new model by paying the price difference of around $80, she said.
Bailey also faced several problems with her 1400 series, but she said she has not received any sort of compensation from the University. Her problems ranged from the power supply troubles faced by many juniors to a clock that lost minutes every hour.
Though all computers have since been offered with three-year warranties, the 1400-series models sold in 2000 were offered with a choice between a free one-year warranty, and an option for three years of coverage for a charge.
"IBM seemed to build them just good enough so that once the one-year warranty ended, the defects made their presence known," Vanessa de la Torre '04 wrote in an email.
Despite the problems the IBM models have had, both Bodenstein and Re stand by the decision to go with IBM over rival brands.
"We've experienced one particular type of problem with the 1400, and one with the T22," Re said. "It's not to say if you had another type of laptop that you wouldn't have these or bigger problems."
Bodenstein said, "I think we at OIT have done the best we could to provide the best to students. But you can only see so far into the future."
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