Using Old Computers as Thin Clients

[Big_Mac]

Hello,

At work half our staff use Thin Clients (HP and Wyse) to connect to a Microsoft terminal server.

The other half are using old desktop computers to connect to our domain.

Now I know that these can be made into Thin Clients through software such as Microsoft Fundamentals for Legacy Systems and Various shades of Linux by using RDP.

What I don't understand though is if we do this, will the graphics and memory of the desktops be utilised in addition to work being done on the server? Over the last couple of years I have upgraded the memory in our old beasts and it would be a shame if this wasn't accessed anymore.

Hope I made sense in this email :-)

Cheers,

Paul.

[matt40k]

Nope. Will use about 8mb of VGA memory, the rest will be used as heating... which isn't a bad thing in this cold weather. PS I hate anyone on holiday somewhere hot or still has good weather (Ignoring the fact we have sun in Ipswich at the mom)

[Big_Mac]

Hi Matt40k,

That is really sad - is there no way of utilising the memory of the old pc (2Gb)?

What we are trying to do is have everyone connect to the terminal server. This would include 2 dual core computers we have.

I was hoping that we could install latest Adobe Photoshop on the terminal server and because these 2 computers have good graphics cards, that they would be able to run the program properly - am I dreaming?

PS, I used to live in Ipswich (in Queensland Australia) - it can get up to 45 degrees celsius there - - - I think I would prefer where you are

Does anyone else have any experience connecting newer computers to terminal servers?

Cheers,

Paul.

[matt40k]

It's about 16 degrees here... sure I'll swap... so long as I can bring the air con and someone pays my flight

Don't think you can. I suppose you could have a mstsc shortcut (office etc) then have photoshop on the local computer. You'll need to lock it down.

I believe you'll be waiting for Google to release an public OS. I believe they can split loads across multiple machines like what you want. Not sure about Citrix, I've never used it, but I guess it's the same.

Adobe Photoshop doesn't really go with terminal services.

Photoshop = fat clients (high cpu\ram\hdd)
terminal = thin clients (low cpu\ram\hdd)

You guys using SIMS .net over there?

[CyberNerd]

If you use LTSP on the thin client server you could take advantage of localapps so that resource intensive applications run on the client: LocalApps < Ltsp < TWiki