Desktop Dinosaurs?

Notebooks rule: 7 in 10 college students have notebook computers — up 67 percent in three years. Desktop ownership among the group has dropped 34 percent over the same period. 67 percent own an MP3 player; 23 percent of those use it to watch videos.

Cell Phone Turnaround

Cell phones saturate the college-student market: 88 percent — the number of college students equipped with cell phones Approximately 33 percent — the number of college students that had cell phones in 2000

Fake ID

According to the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego, young adults ages 18 to 29 account for 30 percent of all identity-theft victims.

IT systems at Georgia Highlands College in Cartersville, Ga., were possibly exposed to viruses this summer after a Georgia Highlands student was arrested for hacking into the school’s administrative systems to change his grades, install keystroke logging programs and capture passwords. He logged in using the identity of a math professor, according to reports.

SOURCE: Rome News-Tribune, Rome, Ga.

Meter Readers

In a survey of more than 100 IT professionals in higher education, 88 percent say they manage energy consumption in their departments. Among those with procurement responsibility, 31 percent say energy efficiency is a very important consideration when purchasing new desktop or client IT equipment, while 36 percent say the same for data center equipment.

49 percent say someone in their IT department receives reports, authorizes payments or otherwise has responsibility for the amount and cost of energy used in the organization’s IT operations.

Source: E2IT: The Energy Efficient IT Report, CDW•G (www.cdwg.com/e2it)

Virtual Leader

Server virtualization and server consolidation are the number one and number two spending priorities in the next 12 months for IT professionals across a broad spectrum of industries (including those in higher education), according to a Goldman Sachs survey.

Almost 55 percent say server virtualization is a “high priority,” while nearly 50 percent say server consolidation is a “high priority,” according to the survey. Cost cutting, application consolidation, data center consolidation, business intelligence, security, storage hardware, disaster recovery and storage virtualization, respectively, rounded out the list’s top 10. Storage virtualization rose from number 24 on last December’s list to number 10.

SOURCE: Goldman Sachs 41st IT spending survey