I noticed that the English lab at our college has been upgraded. It must have been done at least 6 months back. The lab has been nicely furnished with cool looking tables n chairs, and around 40 new computers, all with dual-core processors and lots of RAM and hard drive space. They’ve also purchased English training software approved by the university for all the computers.

I’ve been in this college for more than 3 years (I’m in the final year now), and during this period, there have been several improvements in infrastructure. Still, we find if difficult to get resources where we need them.

For example, the common computer center here has some 75 computers and the students can browse during non-class hours. The problem is that all these computers were bought at least 3 years before I joined the college, and are vintage items now. They have Celeron 700 Mhz processors, have 128 MB of RAM and run Windows 2000.

Well, even the Windows 2000 thing doesn’t matter. The biggest problem is that all these computers have only Internet Explorer 5.0 installed. The technicians say all other browsers are as evil as hell. Nobody cares if IE5 doesn’t support AJAX. Why does it matter to them? The entire computer center is not capable of display in the standard gmail interface, and they don’t have the slightest idea of installing at least a newer browser!

And moving on, even while opening normal HTML pages, these computers won’t let us open more than 3 browser windows at a time. If we do, they will slow down terribly or worse, stop responding completely!

Why does the English lab, which runs only training programs need such nice computers while the common computer centre has vintage computers? What is sickening is the fact that the college has nice computers, but not where it is actually required.

This college would have been at a much better place, if they had learnt to manage the resources properly. I was wondering if their idea of creating a nice learning environment is different altogether!