With this year's ThinkPad selection the university chose to become a uniter, instead of a divider.

Although long at the top of students' wish lists, the university's committee on information technology, which determines the components of the university-supplied laptops each year, chose not to include DVD-ROM drives in student ThinkPads in the past, saying there was little educational benefit to DVDs.

Now in the fifth year of the university's technology initiative, falling technology costs coupled with increased educational uses for the format have reversed the long-held stance of the powers-that-be. The IBM ThinkPad A30m supplied next year to juniors and incoming freshmen will include a "combo drive" that will write to recordable CDs as it has before, but will also read data and video DVDs.

At the same time, next year's system will include increased speed, memory and screen size, but also an increased total weight of nearly eight pounds. The computer will pack a 1.3 GHz Pentium III processor, Windows XP, 384 MB of RAM, 30 GB hard drive, a 15-inch LCD display and will weigh 7.4 pounds.

"The thing that was on the top of the list to get was the upgrade in memory to be able to run XP," said Jay Dominick, an assistant vice president and chief information officer. "We pretty much got everything in the package we wanted."

However, with an upgrade to Microsoft's next-generation operating system Windows XP, Information Systems must upgrade the school's servers and make sure the new OS doesn't conflict with the current software load.

On April 16, all university user names will be moved over to an XP-friendly server. According to a March 25 letter to server administrators, IS said the only change average computer users should notice is a change of domain from WFU to "Deacnet," and shared resources, such as files and printers, will need to be re-shared.

"It's not really required for Windows 98, it is required for us to rollout the XP systems. That's why we implemented it," said Lee Norris, the director of academic operations and systems support.

"We can't just convert WFU, because that would damage what everyone does," Norris said. "We have a whole bunch of services and a whole bunch of logins, and that would damage it."

In addition to Windows XP, IS will also make available some software programs provided by Adobe Systems, Inc. According to Dominick, next year's ThinkPads will be loaded with the full version of Adobe Acrobat, which will allow students to write PDF files, and a few licenses of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere will also be available to install.