(Spring 2015 – Fall 2015)
During junior year, the Office of Information and Technology (O.I.T.) informed the Computer Information Systems (C.I.S.) class that the Engineering lab was putting a grant proposal together for a new lab. We needed to look into computers what would be the best fit for the engineering class. We had to incorporate the system requirements of the programs they run currently and programs they plan on running in the future. We used PCPartPicker to help with our research. The site has a built-in compatibility checker to make sure each part works with the others.We finally settled on a computer that had an i7 intel processor, 8GB of RAM and a Nvidia Quadro graphics card. C.I.S. and the O.I.T. director decided that a prebuilt system from Dell fitted our needs best because not only did they have the desired system configuration, but they also came with a longer warranty and licensed software.
During the beginning of senior year we heard the grant for the money went though, we were told we would be setting up the new computers. In this project, we used the experience from setting up the Mac computers junior year into a more time sensitive task. The previous project in the Mac Lab prepared us for setting up another computer lab and was a good experience for learning how to operate within a given time-frame.