SIMS & Asus EEE-PC

[FragglePete]

I've seen various threads on people running SIMS on a Asus EEE-PC but just wondering how it's going?

 

I'm looking at getting a number of these devices for easy Electronic Registration with SIMS during assembly, and wondering how well it works. We are getting a number of PDA's with mobile registration on, but quite frankly the licencing and maintenance costs per device are very high.

 

I'm going try and get hold of one of these and give it ago, but just wanted some feedback first.

 

Cheers

 

Pete

[kmount]

I can't stand the Mobile PDA solution unless its changed since I last looked at it.

 

The EEE-PC is fine, it runs SIMS ok but its a bit slow all things considered.

 

I think staff need to be told that its not a replacement for a laptop yet, it lacks the power needed to take the abuse of software overload. Our default build of XP with Symantec Corporate, Office2003 and SIMS left it running fine, but if you start introducing other bits such as MSN/Skype etc it becomes noticeably slower.

[FragglePete]

My intention is to have these for the Assembly period (and other mobile registration) only, and not install Office and anything else. Purely XP, SIMS and AV.

 

Pete

[kmount]

In which case, it should work fine

 

Might be worthwhile using nlite and stripping the XP install of bits you don't want and knocking up an unattended job. - If you really wanted to be clever you could do it all onto a memory card, and copy the card several times, one for each eee, change their details and it should work OK.

[meastaugh1]

We run SIMS (for lesson monitor) via terminal services on the eee's, so speed is good. The only issues we tend to experience relate to the wireless manager included in the default Xandros OS deciding not to auto-connect the wireless network connection.

[kmount]

Yes, its not great.

 

I was toying with putting the wireless config actually into the network config outside of the gui to see if that would jig it a bit better.

[meastaugh1]

Yeah? Let me know how it goes if you get a chance to do it. I install eeexubuntu on one and tried a few wireless managers, none of which seemed suitable for a school/shared user environment.

 

In the end I created a shortcut to a script, which stopped and restarted the wireless connection, before launching rdesktop.

[kmount]

I keep saying I'll do something with the eeepc and never do, so I shall do something on Tuesday!

[FragglePete]

All interesting really.

 

Starting to think this whole Electronic Registration is just a bit of an expensive white elephant!

 

I only started this job five months ago, with the brief that Electronic Reg. must be up and running by September. The money I'm spending upgrading the network infrastructure and now more and more additional hardware is just getting silly.

 

Still, I see if I can get hold of one and have a play, maybe look at X2 using TS as another way of getting it working.

 

Oh joy!

 

Pete