Turning a laptop into a thin client over wireless

[mrbios]

Got some old HP laptops which the science department use in their labs, our whole network is office 2010 and windows 7 now but these laptops are no where near good enough to run all that so i was thinking of turning them into clients....

What is the process/software etc required in order to do this? I already have an appropriate (albeit slow considering the amount of clients connecting to it) terminal server for the job running server 2008R2.

Also any recommendations on improving wireless connectivity speeds? The science department currently has some shoddy D-Link wireless APs that i could replace with HP Procurve ones?

Thanks for any help with this

[dhicks]

What is the process/software etc required in order to do this? I already have an appropriate (albeit slow considering the amount of clients connecting to it) terminal server for the job running server 2008R2.

You just need something that'll run an RDP client - if you have Windows XP installed on the machines you could just get them to auto logon as a local user and start up the RDP client to your TS machines. There are assorted Linux distributions that include RDesktop, and RDP client, too. You could replace the harddrives of the laptops with solid state storage of some kind - you can get 2.5" IDE-to-flash adaptors to replace 2.5" laptop harddrives, you should only need a small Flash card to store a small Linux distribution on.

[sted]

or stick a full linux install on with an icon for rdp when needed so if someone just wants to look up a website they can just boot into linux saving load on the ts for a minor job

[mrbios]

Cheers, i like the idea of using an ide-flash adaptor and putting a small linux distro with just RDP access on.

Also slightly off topic but in the right forum section....does anyone have any lists of terminal services best practices? (not the microsoft worded crap though, something basic and simple) as i need to clean up my TS setup i think.