How often do you use the school’s computers? How often have you whined about the painful login times, or the sluggish network speed, or the inability to effectively run Gmail or YouTube?

If you check the labels on the computers, you’ll notice that they were manufactured in…2005. If you boot up the computer, the first startup screen will show a logo on the bottom left for its processor – an Intel Celeron, which now is sold in low-end laptops. If you check the dates on the software, you’ll notice that our version of Microsoft Office is turning nine this month. And in April, Microsoft itself recommended that administrations start switching out of XP, which our dinosaurs currently utilize.

And then there’s the WiFi in the school, with its spotty connection and crowded bandwidth. Whose idea was it to stuff the wireless activity of 1600 students onto one network?

This is unacceptable. We live in an age of technological advancement, but the technology we use in Franklin High School is woefully inadequate in preparing us for that world.

What can the school do? At the minimum, we can install a more modern browser on the computers, like Google Chrome, Opera 12, or Mozilla FireFox. All three are free, work on XP,  incorporate features like tabbed browsing, and, more importantly, can actually run modern websites, unlike the outdated version of Interner Explorer we are forced to use.

But that won’t solve the core problem with FHS technology: the stuff is outdated. And that can only be fixed by replacing the computers.