Wednesday, September 12th 2007
For Networks, Thin Is In
A decade ago, the network computer (also called the thin-client computer) was promoted as a replacement for personal computers and desktop software. Thin clients have no hard drives to store desktop applications, like Microsoft's Word or Excel, permanently. This prediction is slowly becoming true with today's new, more powerful, thin clients. Shipments are expected to more than double within the next five years.
Several forces are rekindling the interest in thin clients, money being the most obvious. An estimated three-fourths of the annual cost of a corporate PC is attributable to technical support, software upgrades, security patches and other maintenance. Thin computing now offers an alternative. Maintenance and software fixes can be handled more efficiently on central server computers.
Without a hard drive and less need for local processing, thin computers use far less power than PCs. The yearly savings in electric bills can be $150 or more for each desktop. Thin computers are also far less susceptible to viruses and spyware than PCs, which store the programs that are subject to attacks by malicious codes.
Source:
The New York Times
Several forces are rekindling the interest in thin clients, money being the most obvious. An estimated three-fourths of the annual cost of a corporate PC is attributable to technical support, software upgrades, security patches and other maintenance. Thin computing now offers an alternative. Maintenance and software fixes can be handled more efficiently on central server computers.
Without a hard drive and less need for local processing, thin computers use far less power than PCs. The yearly savings in electric bills can be $150 or more for each desktop. Thin computers are also far less susceptible to viruses and spyware than PCs, which store the programs that are subject to attacks by malicious codes.
20 Comments on For Networks, Thin Is In
It really is a lot simpler than having 100 different PC's with 100 different setups and an infinite amount of problems
The added expenses for a terminal server and the software just wouldn't be logical for a home
What I mean by that, is that my Girlfriend's boss just bought 2 Thin Clients and the server to run them for $5000, and all the Thin Clients can do is run a single Vet program for tracking patients! They can't do anything else, so they still have to keep 3 desktops, a laptop, and another file server running to run everything else they need and the two systems have to be linked together to function correctly, and they charged him another $1000 to come out and set it all up.
The people selling him the stuff completely ripped him off. He originally called them because we got really bad storms up here a few weeks ago, and two computers were hit by lightning. For $5000 he could have gotten so much more, or he could have just spend $1000 and got two computers and been able to use them for everything and not just running one single program.
I'm just saying that we are moving towards having a computer in every room of the house, it seems, just to have access to the Internet, so Thin Clients would allow that.
Replace the parenthesis with square brackets "[" and "]"On second thought, if it's too much trouble to make multiple quotes in a post go ahead and double post, I'll understand.
But that is probably more than I can legally say, NDA.