“Noel MacDonald, a Westside parent of an 11-year-old who attends Bayview elementary school, said many computers in his son’s school have been marked with a red dot, signifying that the machine is so old it wouldn’t be able to withstand the anti-virus program.”
So, they’re more than two years old and they’re trying to install McAfee products on them, then? :P
A locked-down computer with automatic updates installed shouldn't need anti-virus software.
If they were all booting off a standard configuration, and if they didn't have local access to hardware [e.g. no ability to boot to floppy or boot to cd-rom] and if they had Active Directory [or Novell Directory Services] policies which locked down the access to the innards of the box, then none of this stuff could happen.
The very fact that staff had to physically visit each and every computer [instead of being able to remote-reinstall each computer] indicates to me that this was a haphazard, slipshod environment where a catastrophe was just waiting to happen.