#11 United States Military Academy

By PCMag Staff

December 20, 2006

Brigade deputy and senior Aaron Stark says that like life in the U.S. Army itself, student life in the prestigious military academy in New York's Hudson River Valley offers few opportunities to leave campus and visit home. So he relies on his school-issued Dell Precision M65 laptop all the much more to stay in contact with family and friends.

When a student begins classes at West Point, he or she quickly discovers that the laptop becomes the center of a cadet's universe—as the primary connection to classwork, training, problem-solving, social networking, family, and entertainment. Each laptop is tethered invisibly to the totally wireless West Point campus.

"The laptop becomes their property," says Col. Curtis Carver, vice dean for resources. "Our dorm rooms have no TVs—it's built into their laptops. We send 26 channels, and if they want to watch a movie, they have a DVD drive. Two years into their time here, we upgrade their laptops to keep up with technology and load new applications."

Top-of-the-line technology, such as dual-core processors and 256MB graphics cards, costs the school about $2,600 per laptop, but the educational benefits cannot be easily measured.

Col. Carver has noticed that with the advent of online learning, new bridges are being built connecting different disciplines in ways never before seen. "We're probably the only institution where every course we teach is loaded and offered online via Blackboard, creating an all-digital classroom on an all-digital campus."

At West Point, cadets maintain their machines for the electronic version of a "white glove" inspection, in which hard drives are examined to ensure that they are properly defragmented and that antivirus software is up-to-date.

The campus has a group of specially trained computer techs known as "gold coats" who keep all things technical inspection-ready. "They can re-image a hard drive in about 8 minutes and answer almost any tech-support question," says Stark.

It's not all drills and tests at West Point. The school allows cadets to IM, download music, and connect to others via MySpace and Facebook during their off hours. In addition, students are allowed 1GB of online storage outside of e-mail (those in final design courses are allotted more).

When we asked Col. Carver what's the next big thing on the technological horizon for the next year's class of freshman cadets, he said "All cadets will get cell phones issued by us—which will be just another way to maintain connectivity."