The hardware to a computer is one of the easiest things to forget about when working on a laptop or desktop computer. For a laptop especially, students don't usually look beyond the keyboard and screen. However, there are many different aspects that go into a laptop, and many of them can be used to interact with the web (and thus websites, like Transport Orange).
The most obvious piece of hardware is the mouse. For a wireless mouse (and few college kids use a wired mouse with a laptop), you just plug the USB into the USB port and turn on the mouse and you're all set! You don't have to scroll around using that sometimes annoyingly sensitive finger pad anymore. It's also very handy for clicking on links, for instance to certain Syracuse-related transport sites for students who need to find rides. Just saying.
Also important in a laptop is the memory. Memory is what allows a student to look up Transport Orange and bookmark it for future reference or save it as a tab when they open their Internet browser. It can also save your login username and password for the site so that you don't have to type it in constantly ever time you visit the site. That could be very handy, because hopefully students are visiting the site often. USB ports can also come in handy with memory. If, for some reason, a student cannot access their laptop to get on the Transport Orange website, they could use a flash drive to save their information or the information that they have downloaded to the site and have it ready for when they need to bring it up again on another laptop. Flash drives can make or break a students day depending on what is saved (or not saved) on that little piece of plastic. There are many other pieces of hardware that go into making a computer, but come into as close of an interaction as the keyboard, the mouse, and the memory. Can you blame students for not looking any farther into their hardware than they have to?
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