Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on April 15, 2005 08:34 AM
Hi.
I am the original poster (of this "I do this for a living" comment).
I've tested a Pentium I 75MHz as thin client. It was sluggish. Movies could certainly be watched, because they were rendered in a powerful server. Applications started instantly (e.g., Word seen through rdesktop).
Nonetheless, Flash was bad and scrolling was very annoying -- unless when using pure X without compression... read on, please.
One replier talked about having a decent video card. This may be real useful -- mainly if it's AGP. All that I've tested was onboard (they were real thin clients, no PCs), except the Pentium 75MHz, which used a Trident 9680 (an old 2MB card), IIRC. I suspect the main problem was network compression and local decompression. Using pure X protocol, results were fairly good, even with a Pentium 75MHz, but the network wouldn't bear the many users we have. Besides, we already used the LAN for fileserver access, email, data exchange between servers etc.
> I laugh when someone who claims to know about this tells me that I need 700MHz for a good thin client.
I _know_ about this, but I understand you don't need to believe me. Also, schools must deal with dire budgets, while we at work had to deliver an experience at least similar to a good desktop PC -- or we'd lose credibility.
Do you have any way of reducing network bandwidth consumption while still keeping decompression (and hence, local CPU overload) to a minimum?
All TightVNC compression schemas weren't specially useful on a 75MHz machine, but they could work on a 133MHz one.
Since I must connect to Windows servers and VNC doesn't work well in Windows (compared to how good it is on Linux), we opted for a proprietary protocol with a free Linux client [<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;-) ].
All I can say is: It is annoying in a 266MHz National Geode thin client, according to my experience. It's ok for normal use (e.g., in a charity) -- even moreso if you remove the flash plugin -- but professional people demand higher performance.
But if you're using with the few users the author mentions (12 or 13, as you say), and using pure X protocol without any compression, I believe a Pentium 133Mhz would be good enough.
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Re:I do this for a living.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 15, 2005 08:34 AMI am the original poster (of this "I do this for a living" comment).
I've tested a Pentium I 75MHz as thin client. It was sluggish. Movies could certainly be watched, because they were rendered in a powerful server. Applications started instantly (e.g., Word seen through rdesktop).
Nonetheless, Flash was bad and scrolling was very annoying -- unless when using pure X without compression... read on, please.
One replier talked about having a decent video card. This may be real useful -- mainly if it's AGP. All that I've tested was onboard (they were real thin clients, no PCs), except the Pentium 75MHz, which used a Trident 9680 (an old 2MB card), IIRC. I suspect the main problem was network compression and local decompression. Using pure X protocol, results were fairly good, even with a Pentium 75MHz, but the network wouldn't bear the many users we have. Besides, we already used the LAN for fileserver access, email, data exchange between servers etc.
> I laugh when someone who claims to know about this tells me that I need 700MHz for a good thin client.
I _know_ about this, but I understand you don't need to believe me. Also, schools must deal with dire budgets, while we at work had to deliver an experience at least similar to a good desktop PC -- or we'd lose credibility.
Do you have any way of reducing network bandwidth consumption while still keeping decompression (and hence, local CPU overload) to a minimum?
All TightVNC compression schemas weren't specially useful on a 75MHz machine, but they could work on a 133MHz one.
Since I must connect to Windows servers and VNC doesn't work well in Windows (compared to how good it is on Linux), we opted for a proprietary protocol with a free Linux client [<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;-) ].
All I can say is: It is annoying in a 266MHz National Geode thin client, according to my experience. It's ok for normal use (e.g., in a charity) -- even moreso if you remove the flash plugin -- but professional people demand higher performance.
But if you're using with the few users the author mentions (12 or 13, as you say), and using pure X protocol without any compression, I believe a Pentium 133Mhz would be good enough.
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