Recently, a school-wide crisis has ensued. School laptops seem to be having a variety of malfunctions. Students are disgruntled about the situation as it slows progress on assignments, and in some cases even delays tests.

These problems have been described very similarly by many students. The most common issue is the struggle with highlighting text to copy and paste. Others, however, include a mouse that occasionally freezes or won’t click.

“When I’m trying to highlight an area of text, it doesn’t highlight all the text,” sophomore Ryan Barrus said. “Then it moves the highlighted text where I don’t want it to be.”

The current state of the laptops has been a slight hindrance to productivity. Not only do they act up when trying to copy and paste, but in the case of some unlucky students, they might misbehave in the middle of tests.

“I was taking a biology test, and my mouse wouldn’t move,” sophomore Kyra Morrow said. “I had to write out all of my answers on a piece of paper!”

Just because these problems exist doesn’t mean that there aren’t solutions, though. These solutions may not work for everybody, and they do take longer than using the mousepad. Still, some prefer to use them rather than fiddle with the faulty touchpads.

“I have to use the touchscreen to highlight stuff,” senior Lachelle Lee said. “It takes up a lot more time than it should really take.”

Although these malfunctions have affected schoolwork, they are also an incredible annoyance. Even with some of the simple solutions that students have found, the problems continue to be incredibly obnoxious.

“It [the touchpad] clicks when I don’t want it to, and then when I want it to click it doesn’t click and it’s very annoying,” Barrus said. “It makes me aggravated and gets me out of that homework mind space.”

The influence of this defect has stretched as far as extracurricular activities. School laptops are used in a variety of extracurricular activities, such as robotics, speech and debate, drama, and more.

“I’m in speech and debate, so I need to copy and paste quotes,” Morrow said. “So when I can’t highlight things, it’s very frustrating.”

Nobody really knows what caused this, but everyone has their suspicions. It could be a faulty update, or it could be the result of user error. Some people think the malfunction simply makes a statement about how awful the school laptops are.

“It’s definitely the computers; our old laptops didn’t do this,” Morrow said. “I’d even say these new laptops are worse. It’s quite unfortunate.”