Dear Editor,
As a freshman at BYU in 1996, I experienced firsthand the frustrations associated with trying to use a computer on campus. At that time, students had to pay $12 each semester to create a student computer account. BYU then announced that the fee would be increased to $20 per semester, which would have been fine, but the service they were charging students for was not worth $12 per semester, much less $20.
Computers were often broken and lines filled with students waiting for computers reached legendary proportions.
In the five years since, however, BYU has made noble strides toward the resolution of the computer woes that plagued so many students for so long. Most notably, the user fee was completely dropped and all computer services are now available free of charge to the student population. Several new computer labs have sprung up around the university, including a large lab in the Kimball Tower and two labs in the new library addition. Broken computers seem to be more of a scarcity and one can usually avoid lines by trying different labs.
Yet there is one problem that has emerged to torment the lives of students and faculty alike: a server possessed by demons with no exorcist in sight. In the last couple of weeks, the server has crashed several times, leaving students scrambling for alternatives. During the week of Sept. 24 alone the entire campus lived through a nightmare of server problems.
Can someone please explain why BYU's server is so prone to accidents? What is being done to improve the situation? The improvements of recent years are great, but they mean nothing if the computers are rendered inaccessible.
Dave Buer
Marshall, Minn.