Collegiate Times

The $350 software bundle required by the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech will not be entirely Microsoft Vista compatible by the fall semester, forcing the college to individually make the decision that they will not endorse the new Microsoft operating system.

“The main thing is that the software is actually used in the curriculum and in the course requirements, if it doesn’t work the kids fail the course,” said Jason Lockhart, director of Technology Innovation in the College of Engineering. “We will be re-evaluating things as we get new information, and if things work out we may or may not be supporting it by the fall, but we can’t guarantee that, and it’s simply because we need to make the decision now, based on all of the classes in engineering, not just the ones whose software does work.”

The College of Engineering has released this non-Vista stipulation in the current engineering computer requirements and have said that students who do upgrade do so at their own risk. Technical support for the new operating system will be non-existent from the College of Engineering.

“We can only support, because of the limited resources with the budget and personnel, one direction,” Lockhart said. “We can only support what works, so if it doesn’t work we can’t recommend it at this time.”
To further examine Vista and its student compatibility, the COE has utilized a Student Technology Council headed by President Daniel Culpepper, a

Senior Materials Science and Engineering major. This council will continue to test run the new operating system and make it’s recommendations to the COE, but Culpepper has his doubts about its ability to benefit existing students.

“The expense of upgrading outweighs its benefits making it very expensive for older hardware,” Culpepper said. “If your computer is two or three years old you won’t be able to find the drivers to make your printer or webcam work. You shouldn’t be upgrading and you shouldn’t have to pay.”

The university is currently finalizing its own computer requirement but for many of the disciplines on campus, the software incompatibility is not a problem.

“It’s new and different but you’ll be hard pressed to find Windows XP as time goes on,” said Kevin Davis, Technical Lead of 4HELP. “As long as student’s computers meet the other hardware requirements, Vista should be fine.”

Davis said that he and the university support staff have been working with Vista since January and are capable of walking students through individual Vista problems. Davis reiterates the inability of Vista to coordinate with older machines and warns returning students that Vista requires a large amount of RAM to run. The hardware requirement for all new students will now recommend 2 gigabytes of memory.

“You lose some of the effects when you use an older computer, you may find that when you upgrade to Vista it will be slower because it’s trying to do more stuff,” Davis said. “Vista seems to want a good bit of memory and a higher-end video card to see some of the new features.”

Davis understands the incompatibility problems the engineering departments are having and also recognizes that at this point, the software companies are racing to keep up with Vista.

“They’ve had a lot of trouble with their software packages working for the next year,” Davis said. “They want time to test it and make sure it works. They want to make sure that students won’t come in with software that doesn’t work and are actually working on making sure that XP is still available for their incoming students.”

The weight rests solely on the shoulders of the software vendors and according to the Vista statement released by the COE, the upgrade to

Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise Edition is a part of the Engineering Software Bundle. Lockhart said the software vendors are not dragging their feet and that the MatLab 2007A version has been released in the last month with other important engineering programs, like Autodesk, ready to launch in the April/May timeframe.

“Smaller companies just don’t have the kinds of resources that a big company like Microsoft does, so it takes them longer to put out their product,”

Lockhart said. “Not to mention the fact that the Vista Application Programming Interfaces, that allows other people to write software for it, may not have been complete until a month or so before Vista was released. Their development doesn’t start day one when Vista’s development starts.”

The College of Engineering will re-examine the feasibility of using Vista for the 2008 spring semester and if found viable, will offer the upgrade to its students.

“The support infrastructure we are going to be working on will be a step by step kind of thing for students that have XP on their machines to allow them to do the upgrade themselves,” Lockhart said.