Michael's point about testing is excellent! :-) Other considerations include comparing prices - the price of desktop computer has decreased greatly in the past few years, narrowing the price difference from thin clients.
Also consider how you might want to use the desktop/local machines. The VCL is a desktop augmentation setup - so you likely want to use the local machines for web surfing, e-mail, perhaps word processing ..., what else. That decision impacts the price of the thin client. --henry schaffer On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Michael Jinks <mji...@uchicago.edu> wrote: > Several years ago, we put thin clients (Sun Ray) in all our public > computing spaces and computer-equipped classrooms. They work great for > most things, and they do indeed save lots of expense and hassle. > > We're now in the process of going back to PC's, though. There are > several reasons, but the one that might apply to other sites is remote > display of graphically-intensive applications. 3D rendering is the > obvious one, but there are also a few legacy (DOS-era) scientific > graphing packages that don't play well with a network-connected display, > and the accumulated latency during real-time graphing appears to the > user as a drastic slowdown in performance. > > So, test all your apps thoroughly before you commit. > > > On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 09:41:11AM -0400, Dmitri Chebotarov wrote: >> Hi All, >> Is anyone here is using a thin client with VCL? I.e. Dell FX100 or >> similar? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client). >> This could work well with VCL, since most of thin boxes support RDP. >> Interesting to see how a thin client compares to a regular PC in >> classroom environment. >> Seems like this would be a better option - less expensive, less admin >> overhead, more secure, and with all the benefits of VCL... >> Thanks. >> >> -- >> Dmitri Chebotarov >> Virtual Computing Lab Systems Engineer, TSD - Ent Servers & Messaging >> 223 Aquia Building, Ffx, MSN: 1B5 >> Phone: (703) 993-6175 >> Fax: (703) 993-3404 > > -- > Michael Jinks :: mji...@uchicago.edu :: 773-469-9688 > University of Chicago IT Services
