The Student News Site of Black River Falls High School

BRFHS Paw Print

The Student News Site of Black River Falls High School

BRFHS Paw Print

The Student News Site of Black River Falls High School

BRFHS Paw Print

Frustration mounts as laptops restart

Frustration+mounts+as+laptops+restart

Multiple laptop restarts are frustrating students and slowing homework completion after a new policy forcing 7:50 a.m. restarts was put in place.

While those restarts are set to happen once a day during advising, some students experience multiple restarts throughout the day.

“Sometimes it’s annoying when I am working on a project and I forget to save it and it gets deleted because of the forced restart,” sophomore Madeline Diehn said.

Peggy Gordon, the district technology supervisor, says that a reason that laptops may not restart right at 7:50 AM is if the laptop isn’t on at that time, leading it to restart whenever the computer gets turned on.

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Justice Steponik said that his laptop sometimes restarts eight times a day. He also mentions that some of the restarts take longer than other restarts.

“I think we shouldn’t have the laptop restart thing because it’s really annoying, and if you have something that you forgot to save then you will lose all that work. Plus, if someone already had their laptop restarted or shut down, it’ll just make it restart right after you log in,” senior Chelsea Hulett, said.

Hulett also said that she doesn’t see why the laptops need to be restarted and why students just can’t restart their laptops themselves instead of the laptops manually restarting.

“I have my laptop on by 7:50 to restart, and it’ll restart, and then the next time I open it, it restarts again,” Mackenzie Bedell said.

Students have been having problems with their laptops restarting. Why are these restarts necessary for all the laptops?

“Laptops restarting at 7:50 AM is by design. We tried not enforcing a restart last year, but for the most part, students did not restart their laptop on their own each day, so we had to do the forced restart again this year,” Gordon said.

A Google form was filled out by forty-six students stating about half of the students said that their laptops restarting had given them problems with getting their work done. This form was made by made by math teacher Adam Kaszubowski for his students after students brought up the possible issue.

Gordon responded to an email from Kaszubowski to explain why the laptops must be restarted daily. Some of these reasons include laptops can go faster after restarting, restarting fixes things that could later turn into bigger issues, and restarting helps refresh group policies and much more.

“There are two types of group policy. One set applies to the laptops and one set applies to the users. There are all kinds of different policies that get applied to each. For instance, the BRF Students bookmark bar gets sent out through a user group policy. Chrome app extensions get sent out. Wifi, password policies (length, security, how often they need to be changed, whether they can be changed, etc). Teachers are forced to change their passwords every six months for security. Students are not allowed to change their passwords. All of that is forced out through group policies,” said Gordon.

Gordon also mentioned that without the group policies getting refreshed things like bookmarks, passwords, wifi settings, power settings, login screen items, rights to your folders in the U: drive and much more couldn’t be updated. This could cause issues for students and teachers for their laptops.

“If your laptop is restarting more than once a day, please email me your laptop number and a good time when I can remote in and take over for a little bit. For me to remote in, your laptop must be on and I may have to log you out, so make sure you have your stuff saved before I take over,” said Gordon.

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The Student News Site of Black River Falls High School
Frustration mounts as laptops restart