For the record, I have no days with more than 3 hours of class this semester, and that's pretty normal. The bulk of the work in college is homework, which you can do from the comfort of your bed/couch/floor/beanbag chair/whatever.

Seriously, it's a lot better in college, in my opinion. Grated, you actually have to try, as opposed to high school.

inb4 I suck at getting homework done

Depends what college and what year. At my college, for example, I had 18 to 23 credit hours of class per semester, which means 18 to 23 hours of class per week. I'd agree that the biggest time sink is assignments, though, and in hindsight the experience was certainly rewarding and worth it.

Even on the upper end, that still averages to only 4.6 hours per day.

ATM, I do about 3.5 hours a week of school. That's gonna shoot up a lot next week as I need to take the PSSA, but most weeks that's as much as I can do. The homework assignments are the hardest for me, due to a combination of procrastination and lack of energy.

Has anyone done any online college courses? Can anyone say from experience if that would be a viable option for someone in my position? The TV ads seem overblown to me but I haven't really looked into it. I know there has to be a drawback somewhere.

I tried to keep it at 12 to 15 credits through my EE program, which seemed to work. I was fairly active in IEEE as well, so that sucked up some time.

Kerm-are you familiar with http://calnewport.com/blog/ ? I've done some reading through his site, and there's some good info on studying, both in school and as a professional.

In that case, you're probably going to want to look at a community college with a decent sysadmin program.


Lack of personal interactions with the professor is a drawback for many people....but...if you're an independent learner you should do just fine.

Things have been going better lately, as I did not have to go through the stuff I mentionned months ago that bordered on sexual harrassment, but recently my computer video card and power supply both died on me, although I'M glad the mobo wasn't fried as I thought at first.

Besides that someone changed my Cemetech password. (thankfully my e-mail remained intact so a simple password reset fixed it)

Hm, on my side, I don't have a lot of money, I'm somewhat scared for my results at school and there's 2 weeks left...

But I always look at the bright side of the life. I'll get a job that's paid a lot in 2 weeks and is about what I studied in school, there's 2 weeks of school left, plus I know the guy who posted just before me IRL.

Yeah, that's my philosophy of life. Always look at the bright side. Hakuna matata, something like that.

DJ_O, that's odd, who else knew the password?
rfdave, I hadn't previously heard of it, but I'm looking it over now, and it looks pretty interesting.

Juju knew my Omni password (from myself) but nothing suspicious ever happened. Here I was actually using a different password, which I doubt anyone knew, although maybe it was not secure enough despite being nothing close to horrors I saw from other members elsewhere (eg: Using "Starcraft", "mariorocks" or even their nicknames as a password).

On an off-topic note, but related to my computer repair: Initially I thought the mobo was fried and one guy who did some repair told me that if I replaced the mobo, I would need to reformat Windows because it would not be able to recognize the new mobo, even if I use the same model/brand. Is that even true at all? (Thankfully my mobo was fine so it saved me some bucks, but I was wondering...)

You would not need to reformat, but you might need to reinstall the OS(which can be done without reformatting or losing your programs, though you might lose registry information pertaining to them.).

You would DEFINITELY need to reinstall all your drivers however(and you might need to boot in safe mode first to uninstall them in the first place.)

Nope. If it's the same motherboard it would just be a clean swap. If it was a different motherboard but with the same chipset, it would be a clean swap. If it was a different motherboard with a different chipset, you might need to install new chipset drivers, but that would be it.

You don't need to reinstall windows, nor do you need to reinstall all your drivers. Don't even need to reinstall any drivers - if it uses the same drivers then you're done. You only need to mess with drivers if it needs different ones, in which case you are just installing them. No need for safe mode.

You may very well end up needing to revalidate windows though.

Yup, but that's usually painless. Even if the online validation fails, the phone one usually works, although that one is rather tedious.

yeah, particularly if you get shuffled back and forth between the WGA people and the tech support people while they try to decide which your case falls in.

Or when they don't speak your native language well, if at all.

I didn't get any person, I just got a machine that asked me to read in my CD key. And then it told me some long key to type in. That took forever and a year, but it was all automated. Although this was like 5 years ago, no clue what the process is like these days.

I got that too at first, but if you press the right buttons you can get to a person.