UC Emergency Laptop Program To the Rescue
•
On bad-weather days, the inside of the Gato is packed and one is often hard-pressed to find a seat. The small tables and prevalence of laptops often means sharing a table with a new friend, or searching for a new location.
No more all-nighters in the windowless concrete of the Science Center's computer lab just because your computer died.
Lamont and Cabot Library have 3-hour laptop loan programs, but now students whose laptops experience "hardware failures" have another option. They can borrow a Dell laptop and bring it back to their dorm room for 24 whole hours, thanks to a collaboration between the Undergraduate Council, HUIT, and Harvard College Libraries.
Michael C. George '14, the Student Life Chair of the UC, proposed the idea last semester after having trouble with his own laptop.
"It was motivated out of my own experiences with my own laptop because it just kept crashing at the worst possible moments—like when I had midterms or a paper due, I had to camp out in the Science Center Basement," George said.
The hours and policies of the loaner program may change in the future.
"It's in the pilot stage, and right now we want to see what the student demand is," George said.
While we don't recommend purposely crashing your laptop, be sure to take out a loaner Dell next time such an unfortunate event does occur, and remember that all is not lost—excpet your files, maybe.