One of the things you're mentioning there regarding thin clients isn't quite right. Thin clients do not need to be new machines. Roughly half our thin clients here are recycled old machines, with all their extraneous bits removed (HDDs, CDs, FDDs) and then running ThinStation. Cost to us? Adding a bit more capacity at the back end. Cost to the environment? Electricity only. The machines themselves are relatively low power anyway, using about 50W when running.

True, we have also bought new thin clients, but the were chosen due to their low energy usage (a dozen of them run at 12W each). And they didn't 'replace' any machines, those machines just moved elsewhere or were the above mentioned stripped down PCs now being used as thin clients.

Every purchase I make now considers energy consumption. Our printers are chosen due to their low standby power usage for example.

But yes, the main reason is down to cost. Our school electricity bill is forever increasing, and we need to stop that somehow.

Hey Localzuk,

Thanks for getting involved. Re-using old machines is a fantastic idea. The resellers are telling me that clients who do this often sacrifice a bit of performance and some software applications, however there's always a solution such as having a separate video editing suite etc. Love the fact you've recycled. Go-Green-PC have built a 4 user small form factor PC running SoftXpand. It started out at 10 watts, but after adding the extra graphics cards it went up to 40 watts total thus 10 watts per user; so as technology improves I think we can reduce power consumption further. I personally am trying to get a good handle on what a thin client means to data centre power consumption, networking, additional costs, etc. When we met with John Suffolk the Govt CIO he downloaded a whole heap of thin client data centre related problems on us to come back to him with answers on. Have you got any data on your power use before thin client and power use after? We've begun to recommend the re-actioning of old PCs, populating them with upgraded components too, because then the Green factor is improved further. But remember, the guys from MiniFrame who went to eco-schools came back with the idea that recycling is what Green is and I cannot fault your logic (unless your servers are now super beefed and pumping out the wattage!)