NOVA5000 Australian Trials

Recently our students raised funds to purchase notebooks that they can hire out overnight to work on at home. As much as this was a worthwhile endeavour for students without access to a PC and the internet at home, as an IT Manager I had numerous concerns about purchasing expensive notebooks to go home with students. The NOVA5000 was a welcome compromise – a robust, solid state solution. Not only will we be able to hire the units out overnight for students but we can use them in the science/maths labs during the school day. A better return on investment all around with a fully utilised resource – not just something that will sit on the shelf for most of its life.

To enable the students without internet access at home to remotely connect to our school network and ultimately the web we also allow them to hire an Apple Airport Extreme wireless point that is preconfigured with an automatic dial-up to our remote access server at school. Once the Apple unit is connected to our domain the NOVA5000 can wirelessly communicate with the Apple base station and ultimately open an RDP session on our Terminal Server and have access to all the applications and internet that they would normally access if they were on campus in a student computer lab. This facility will be most welcome to the disadvantaged student without access to PC/Internet at home.