green PC's

[NewOrder]

I was sent some info about this company. The owner was a speaker at the naace conference. He went down well. VeryPC, Ecology | Economy | Performance Has anybody bought their products?

[jedmondson]

I haven't brought any of there products but i remember speaker to a sales manager at bett10 there pcs looked nice and felt rugged enough. you could also buy a plate that attached the pc to the back of a monitor.

[tmcd35]

I haven't used them yet but they are on a very short list to be contacted for a future project I have in mind. Their basic concept is 'multiseat computing' which I am very much into (see other threads) so I may be wanting them to build PC's for me rather than build my own. AFAIK they offer both nComputing and Microsoft Multipoint Server based solutions.

[pwds]

FWIW PcPro have liked several of their products

[PeteHopton]

Thanks guys

 

I was the guy who spoke at the NAACE conference.

 

Happy to answer any questions.

Edited April 9, 2010 by PeteHopton
forgot to say who i was

[chrisredfield93]

sorry not sure if this is the place or bring up another post look at these if thinking of going greener with computers, gotta be a catch somewhere i think.

 

products 0watt Fujitsu

[PeteHopton]

I'm going to file the zero watt PC/Monitor in the store room with all the green paint and the perpetual motion devices.

 

"Conservation of Energy"

 

At the end of the day, the components on the motherboard are the same (chipset etc) they need power to maintain their S5 (soft off) ACPI mode status.

 

The network card for instance needs power to work with WOL mode.

 

So there is power coming from somewhere, just not from the plug at this point in time.

 

It is possible (extreamly likely) there is a battery inside the unit, probably inside the PSU that is being discharged and recharged at a time when the machine is on.

 

Taken from Fujitsu FAQ

 

"What happens when the battery is empty? How can I switch on the PC again?

An emergency ON button at the rear of the PC power supply unit can be manually operated at anytime to wake the PC from 0-Watt mode, for example having replaced the battery or the mainboard."

 

I haven't managed to find their 'pending patent' published, this should reveal all when I find it - unless its in japanese.

[powdarrmonkey]

Ordinary visitors don't capitalise buzzwords (well, except when they're emphasising them...).

[Shuriken1]

Ordinary visitors don't capitalise buzzwords (well, except when they're emphasising them...).

Or misspelling them.

 

No harm intended, just couldn't help but comment.

 

Shuriken1.

[firefox_2006]

We have been using SoftXpand for approximately a year now and have had nothing but problems with it so far. The main fault being a reboot issue where the main tower unit just randomily restarts (sometimes several times during a lesson) causing students to loose work. We have sent "dump files" off to miniframe in Israel on several occasions and are just in a vicious circle at the minute. Every new release has some bug attached to it which is infuriating (version 3 + always asks students to reset their password as it has expired (which it hasn't)) and you have to hack Movie Maker to get it to work on all the stations. Also the much coverted single point of failure issue makes me think whilst this is a good solution in theory....it has some way to go in order to be a complete alternative to standard desktops.

[ReBoot]

I used VeryPc hardware along with SoftXpand, a desktop virtualization solution. This has given me a complete GREEN IT solution.

 

I can only speak from my experience looking after a number of these systems. The additional graphics and USB cards/hubs/audio dongles with associated cabling make for quite a complex single PC setup which needs careful management. As this is normally a classroom system exposed to children I don't find this additional complexity easy to manage and keep away from prying hands. I frequently experience issues with sound and misconfigured or non functional HIDs on one or more workstations.

 

More serious issues that might be solved with restarting a single PC now mean 6 pupils are affected.

 

There are also software compatabilty issues. The majority of software works seamlessly but there are always one or two applications which don't quite work properly. As helpful as SofXpand may be the application vendor may not give a high priority to the relatively small user base using these specialised systems.

 

I think you either love or hate these systems. Personally I would take a great of persuasion to recommend SoftXpand to a school.

[jmak]

I'm going to file the zero watt PC/Monitor in the store room with all the green paint and the perpetual devices

 

Just had to share. Recently visited Anglian Ruskin University in Cambridge. They had a special exhibition on asking for suggestions on how to make Anglian Ruskin greener, with a pile of post it's and pens. Amongst all the worthy suggestions, some bright spark had suggested painting it! Made me laugh anyway.....