Thin clients

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I recently attended a presentation on thin clients. The speaker told us that they were on the rise again due to ease of admining and low cost. I was wondering if any of yall have either come across them at a clients site or have them at your company; and if you deal with them, what are they being used for.

The one example he showed us had a 233mhz processor with 32mb ram, with usb ports, so it wasnt exactly a "dumb" terminal like they used to use back in the day.

Thanks for input.

[homeostasis81]

A few years ago I interned at a company that was using Citrix Metaframe for some apps.

They put some in house apps that were created on the server. The reason for this was the programs were small and they werent worth the trouble of deploying on every machine.

Citrix was just starting to be used so they only had a few applications on it. The vision that they had was to move more and more to thin clients. They really wanted the CAD people doing their work on the server. They figured this would cost less then getting the workstations that cad users want.

However I have read that the best place to use thin clients would be in an environment where a high powered computer isnt required. Such as a call center. I remember seeing an article in PC magazine a while back on thin clients that compared different models. Its way too out of date though so its of little use.

Id think the ideal IT environment would be all thin clients.

[Ahcoraj]

I got an eon3000 at auction cheap, i wanted to use it as a downstairs terminal for my home. I have NT terminal server, and it was easy to configure. It ran web, mail and office apps quite well, however MS RDP only supports 256 color depth. My fiance' wants something she can play the sims on in the living room so it looks like we'll be getting a notebook soon (which is fine for me, as it'll be cool to 'spend time' together with me playing Q3 as she's watching TV..... But they're a really viable option. No hard drive, no moving parts or noise, you can add memory, thers even a hard drive input on the mainboard. Processor is soldered though so no upgrades there. For a small office environment'i'd give it a whirl....Only thing is these machines go for 4-600$ new and you can get a decent PC for the same price.

[Wyckyd1]

Set up in a small environment. People were using a very resource intensive program. In other words thier p133 mhz, 32mb processors ran this software sooooo slowwww it was driving them crazy. Installed Terminal server/client environment. The server was smoking. Now since they actually run off the server they are now very satisfied with the speed. Also great because there is one place to upgrade. Another advantage esp in this case would be they dial use dial up to run the program. The limited bandwidth made it impossible before.

Yes RDP 5 only supports up to 256 color. I beleive right now the only way to do that would be use Citrix and thier ICA protocol. This should change when RDP 5.1 which will be on Windows.net.

[craigmodius]

I have about a dozen or so thinclients running Windows CE on MobilePro thinclient laptops. The Mobile Pro's processor is about the equivalent of a Pentium I speed-wize, but works just fine on WinCE.

They run either Citrix, or Windows2000 terminal services over a wireless network to connect to a couple Patient Documentation programs for the small Hospital I work for.

They are pretty slick, and you can't beat the ease of administration.