Every four years, Madison High School refreshes the student laptops to stay up to date with the rising demands of computers.

Madison rolled out the Dell Latitude 3300s in the 2019-2020 school year, just before the COVID-19 pandemic started. After the laptop’s heavy use during distance learning, Madison purchased new laptops. In the past, Madison has used Dell products, but with a new computer cycle incoming, Madison looked for the next upgrade.

“Dell no longer had a student model laptop available, so we had to look elsewhere,” Madison Technology Support Specialist Kurt Kohls said. 

This brought the Madison technology experts to the Hewlett Packard Chromebooks. While a big change for Madison, the Chromebook is a student laptop used throughout the nation, with 85% of schools having a Chromebook program in the past five years.

At first glance, the Chromebooks are a significant improvement for Madison compared to the previous Dell laptops. Some noticeable specs include a higher resolution display and how they are specifically programmed to use Google, while the Dells were tailored for using Windows and running downloads. The Chromebooks are equipped with solid state drives instead of traditional magnetic hard drives. This allows faster startup and downloading speeds, which is especially important because it allows students to be more efficient with their time. Lastly, the Chromebooks have an all day battery, removing the need to charge during class. This prevents classroom floors from being infested with chargers. 

While the Chromebooks have many positive aspects they come with their fair share of drawbacks. The Chromebooks run off of the cloud, which means that all the information that is on the laptop is online and the computer doesn’t have any specific information stored on it. Typically, this is acceptable because students can use Google Drive to store their documents. However, some elective classes require more than the Chromebooks can offer.

Classes like photography, digital art, and other visionary/artistic elective classes need special software for their class projects. Madison has kept some of the old Dell Latitude 3300s because of this.