I set up AV equipment for lecures in a conference center. There’s one lecturer that is a real pain in the butt. She brings her laptop computer to use with our data projector. But rather than having her Powerpoint file saved to her local drive, she insists on hooking up to our network and running it from a network drive. Because of the room layout, this means about a 30’ cable run that needs to be taped down across trafficked areas.
No real problem, except that her lectures run in the late afternoon, and I’m gone for the day by the time she finishes. The next morning, without fail, I have this big rat’s nest of cable and stuck together duct tape. The facilities people who take down the equipment in the evening cannot seem to learn how to pull up tape without making an incredible snarl. I have actually trained 3 of them how to do it (after the first 3 times it happened), but THEY haven’t been assigned to that duty since. It’s a large hospital, and any of 2 dozen people might get the assignment.
So I asked the woman to save her files to her C: drive, so I don’t have to run the cable. She insists her presentations are too big to run properly UNLESS the computer is hooked into the network. They ARE fairly big, 3-4 megs each, with animation, yadayadayada…, but nothing overhwelming. She believes that hooking up to the network makes her files run faster and crash less. The network and the laptop both run under Windows NT.
I think she’s wrong, but I’m not sure. It seems to me the files’ speed is limited by processor speed, onboard RAM, video card, etc., none of which is improved one bit by hooking up to the network. If anything, the network link will take up some local RAM of its own, and possibly SLOW the Powerpoint file. Since she’s never brought in a file on the local drive, and has no interest in testing my hypothesis, I have been unable to test it myself.
So who is right?
