[plug] Cost of Windows

[Michael Hunt]

"Leon Brooks" <leon at brooks.fdns.net> wrote:

> Thinnish client - as in client machine runs the app but has no moving
parts
> like disks - works well, and you can compress X or (if you're not doing
video
> or 3D) use VNC. Modern machines are not short of horsepower. Decent video
> kills LAN bandwidth no matter how you encode it.
>
> I've used X over 10Mb (switched UTP) for StarOffice and Mozilla and
forgotten
> that it wasn't local, so presumably the same could be said of at least
eight
> or nine users over the same segment of 100Mb. All of the offices that I've
> been to this year that would support more than 20 years also have sixteen
or
> less users on a switch, and typically run gigabit or similar wire/fibre
> between switches. I would expect diminishing returns from running more
than a
> couple of dozen thin users from one server anyway.

Anyone that is considering running thin clients needs to take a look at the
following webpages. Remember that there are simple ways of dropping video
bandwidth of which the simplest (and most often forgotten) is colour depth.
8 bit colour (256) can really speed things up and for most things is more
than adequate. Quality of the video card is very important when selecting
thin clients

http://www.ltsp.org/index.php
http://www.ltsp.org/longstory.php
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/articles/issue14/lu14-Cover_feature-Made_to_measu
re.pdf