Cleaning up student PCs was literally the only work the IT staff at Northwest Mississippi Community College could get done for the first two weeks of every school year -- until this past fall when the college installed NAC gear that automates the process.

Now, with that time freed-up for six fulltime IT staffers plus student staff, Mirage Networks NAC equipment has just about paid for itself in one semester, says Chuck Adams, the network administrator at the school’s Senatobia, Miss., main campus.

“We wanted to get out of the touching-student-PCs business,” Adams says. “We're not 100% there, but we're almost there now. We will be by next fall.”

The labor-intensive process of inspecting 1,000 student PCs for malware, cleaning them up, patching their operating systems and installing McAfee anti-virus software is gone.

Instead, when students try to login, their computers are automatically scanned for compliance with the college’s PC health standard. If the machines flunk, their owners automatically receive instructions on what to do to bring them up to par. Once they are cleaned up, the machines get network access.

The problem arose in 2003 when the Blaster worm wrought havoc on the school’s student network for three weeks, the result of infected student computers. Since then the school has tried to manage student PCs by patching Windows operating systems and updating anti-virus software to help protect the network from similar outbreaks.

Until last fall, this was done by hand. “We would have hundreds of machines that would show up riddled with viruses and spyware. So each machine would take a couple of hours to get fixed,” says Mike Lamar, the network technician for the college. That meant students might have to wait two weeks before getting Internet access, and they complained loudly to school administrators, who made fixing the problem a priority.

"It was so important to our student-affairs department that they paid for the [Mirage] device,” Adams says. “It didn't come out of our budget at all."

So far the students like it. “They perceive it as such a better thing. They know right away if they're going to get on the network or if they're going to have to go have their computer worked on somewhere,” Adams says.