Today's College Dorm Room

A year ago we took our daughter to college for the first time and along with all of other the challenges getting her the right technology was something we spent some time figuring out.

We went through the PC vs. Mac issue, choosing the PC because for Engineering students, the PC still has more engineering software available than the Mac.

We went through the networking issue, choosing to establish a wireless access point in the room so she has more flexibility for herself, her roommate and visitors to the room. For some reason, the University offers wireless everywhere but in the dorm rooms. We also had to make sure she could establish connectivity to the campus wireless network and easily go back and forth between the two networks. We spent a lot of time last year getting this to work because the universities system ties a machine's mac address to their university ID and we were trying to be more flexible in our networking. We finally got this to work by using the mac address of wireless access point to connect to the network.

The printing issue was quick and straightforward as the University offers printers in the dorms and the relatively little printing that she planned on doing didn't warrant dealing with a printer (finding space for it in a small dorm room is always an issue).

The TV issue was something we initially avoided as there are enough distractions for college freshman, but by Christmas, she was comfortable enough to ask for a TV for the second semester. We found a nice LCD TV that would fit in the dorm room and purchased all of the cables needed to connect the TV to both the university's cable system as well to the PC so the girls could leverage their PCs DVD players to show movies on the TV.

As her freshmen year progressed the technology choices we made proved themselves and come the end of the year we shut everything down, wrapped all of the cables around the equipment and boxed it up for the summer.

With this as background last week we headed back to the University for her sophomore year. Same dorm building, different room, different roommate. We unloaded our SUV and lugged everything up to her 3rd floor dorm room.

While my daughter unloaded her boxes, I setup the network and TV. Other than the fact that we left the network cable at home, everything just worked right out of the box. I give credit to the dormitory for stocking network (and other cables) at very reasonable costs. The PC came up, found the wireless access point. We signed the on-line network form and provided her university credentials, rebooted the wireless access points and her PC and she was up and running. Her roommate also connected to our wireless access point using the credentials we provided her.

With her dorm room setup and her technology doing what it is supposed to, she is ready to tackle her sophomore year, which we can only hope goes as smooth as the move to campus went.