By Jonathan M. Gornet ’14
THE ROUNDUP

In the busy office of K13, Mr. Mark Pettit is surrounded by computers and at the top of the stacks are the new Lenova laptops Brophy supplies to freshmen.

Mr. Pettit explained the reasons why Brophy moved from Toshiba, which had been the face of the school’s Tablet program for five years, to Lenova.

“We have to base it on several features, like usability, durability…and price,” Mr. Pettit said.

“Toshiba has been a great machine,” Mr. Pettit said.  “But Toshiba does not make a pen-enabled device anymore; they still make laptops but not convertible laptops.”

So what features do the new laptops have?

“The laptops can reimage themselves and can save kids $20 a shot,” Mr. Pettit said.  “They also have the ability to back up the kid’s data, as well as Windows and all the other programs.”

“And they are little bit faster and have more memory than anything before, but the most part they are the same machine,” he added.

Mr. Pettit said the new machines do lack one thing Toshiba’s did have.

“I still like them to have a DVD drive, but it’s just not available to that platform for a DVD Drive,” Mr. Pettit said.

Freshman Luke Friedman ’15 agreed a disc drive would be nice.

“They’re good technology and all, but what they could have made better was having a disk drive,” Friedman said.  “It would have been a lot better so that we can watch movies and all.”

Friedman said the computers are not perfect but seem to run well overall.  “There are a few but not many problems, but every now and then it would glitch or it would slow down or the stylus won’t work but usually minor problems that are easy to fix,” he said.

“It feels good, it’s like we’re guinea pigs, which is alright, because it’s really high technology, and they seem like great laptops,” Friedman added.