Using old APC's as RDP clients

[AJWhite1970]

I've got 30 old Atom netbooks sat in a cupboard after being retired over the summer. However they are too nice to throw away so I was wondering about potentially turning them into a poor mans thin client by booting into an OS of some flavour and then only being able to connect to our TS farm.

 

Might be an awful idea in practice but any thoughts as to what to try on them? Windows XP cut right down with wifi and a custom shell sprang to mind.... They have 1gb RAM and SSD's

 

Ideas welcome or just point and laugh at me...

Andrew

[Ric_]

Way back I used ThinStation to do something very similar https://thinstation.github.io/thinstation/ - from what I remember it worked quite well to eek a little extra life out of some machines. I do seem to recall having to mess about a bit to get certain drivers to work but, like I said, this was some time ago. I even used this booting from floppy disks on some machines at the time since not all my NICs did PXE!

 

Whilst trying to remember the name of ThinStation, I also came across OpenThinClient - Free OpenSource ThinClient Solution - openthinclient - I've never used this but it's management doofer may be handy since you have 30 things to set up.

[ADMaster]

Once upon a time I used thinstation to pxe boot old machines to a thin client.

There is light weight linux distros like puppy and chromixium worth trying too.

[chinesewhispers]

Windows 7 and Thin Kiosk (though you could use XP as well ). Not free, but pretty close at about £10 per unit.

 

http://thinscaletechnology.com/thinkiosk-pc-to-thin-client-conversion-software/

 

To clarify, it can be done for free, but you can pay a bit for the broker and management which means you can create an image, then deploy very easily with profiles managing the connection and lockdown. Brilliant software.

Edited August 7, 2017 by chinesewhispers

[NotSoFast]

Chrome OS using Neverware? There are TS clients for Chromebooks.

[box_l]

https://ryanmangansitblog.com/2013/03/18/creating-a-windows-thinpc-thin-client/

 

Try this ^

 

We have repurposed over 90 atom netbooks this way.

It may require a couple of tweaks for your environment

But it works really well.

[AJWhite1970]

Thanks. Just finished stripping out just about everything fun in Windows XP on an Atom, boot time is stupidly fast and wifi works after a bit of searching. Now to play with that link....

[box_l]

I will have a look on the school site that we use this and find the tweaked versions.

[box_l]

One thing to note with Microsoft RDS is that there is a bug with Microsoft Word that causes excessive memory use.

 

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/d1eaea2f-cc62-4498-88cf-741f07e995bc/office-pro-2013-0n-terminal-server-slows-server-down?forum=officeitpro

 

This happens if word is open and in focus and the user fails to interact with the window for more that approx. 30 seconds.

 

We scoured the internet and found no real solution for this.

 

Our "fix" is a vbscript that runs constantly in the background and sends a "scroll lock" key press every 15 seconds.

 

This means that the word window is interacted with in a way that does not detrimentally affect the user or the document to any noticeable degree.

 

No more memory hogging issues!

 

BoX

Edited August 18, 2017 by box_l