I'm at a university right now in a program that involves some 3D modeling and rendering. Our 'render farm' was purchased about 4 years ago, and is now barely capable of rendering the scenes the students create in less than a few weeks. So the IT guys had to come up with a solution...

They installed some sort of batch render daemon on the lab computers (windows) causing them to take, and I kid you not, 1 hour to log in. We essentially don't have a lab anymore. Your experience might make the computers seem unusable, but mine truly are for a while.