Statistics 2012/2013

In October 2012 we rebranded the Student Laptop Clinic as the Student Laptop and Mobile Clinic, extending our remit to smartphones and tablets, as well as laptops of all shapes and sizes, (and the odd desktop computer hauled into the clinic!) Mobile devices are increasingly used to connect to our wireless network or online services and we wanted to support this usage. Laptops have still been the majority of our patients but we are now seeing a number of mobile devices as well.

We also extended opening so that the clinic runs 5 days per week, (Monday to Friday) during term time and 3 days per week during the summer vacation. This has been very convenient for students who can now be more flexible about when they visit the clinic and also makes it easier for everyone to remember when the clinic runs. For the next academic year we will extend opening hours so that the clinic runs from 2pm to 5pm on those days, which gives us more time to work on longer or trickier repairs and enables students to choose when to arrive.

In this last year we saw 1079 devices, which is roughly the same as in previous years, though Windows 7 looks more stable that Windows Vista and so there is a slight reduction. Our ratio of devices fixed increased significantly this year, with 55% of all machines being fixed in the clinic, only 23% of customers were referred to external support with hardware faults. The remaining 22% were probably fixed but were sent home to be tested, (connections to home broadband that can't be tested in the clinic, updates or disk scans to complete). It is rare that these return afterwards so we assume that they are fixed and the owners happy, which gives us a ratio of 77% probably fixed, 23% referred to an external company for further assistance.

Below is a graph showing the number of people that we have helped over the 42 weeks that the clinics have been running over the academic year. The academic weeks are shown so you will spot the large spike in October as people start at or return to Bristol but after that we see no major spikes in demand, unlike in previous years. Only a couple of years ago we saw very high demand after Christmas, as students returned with new laptops but that doesn't appear in this year. There is a slight increase in demand in mid-February but nothing major and then demand dips during exam times and then again at the end of the summer term, from when we only run the clinic three days per week.