Thin Client

 The average classroom user uses less than 10% of the processing power of their computer. In a Thin Client setup the extra underutilized processing power is shared by other low powered computers on the network. A thin client is a computer which depends on the server for its processing power. So a thin client may be slow computer but as soon as it connects to the server it uses the processing power of the server and works as fast as the server itself.

Thin clients are used as a PC replacement technology to help customers immediately access any virtual desktop or virtualized application. Thin clients provide businesses a cost-effective way to create a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Thin clients are utilized in various industries and enterprises worldwide that all have different requirements but share common goals. The cost, security, manageability, and scalability benefits of thin clients are all reasons that IT personnel are exploring –and switching– too thin clients.

Cost-wise, the price per seat of a thin client deployment has dropped to the point where it is more cost-effective than regular PCs. This has been a claim that many in the thin client industry have made in the past, but the fact is that the technology that has been developed within the past year has made it a definitive reality.

Benefits of a setting up thin client systems

• Since thin clients are typically low powered devices they consume a lot lesser electricity than compared to a normal fat computer.
• There are no Hard Disks on the thin client , so you save a considerable amount of time and effort in terms of maintaining the hard disk like defragging it checking the machine for viruses, deleting the temp files, optimizing the performance. Backing it up. Basically you have only one hard disk to take care of – The servers hard disk.
• Since the thin client draws processing power from the server , old and obsolete hardware which otherwise you might have to upgrade or discard and now be converted to thin clients and save you lot of hardware costs in the process. Even an old slow laptop can be easily converted to a thin client and the once slow laptop or desktop will work as fast as the server without any upgrades !!!
• Installing any new software or upgrading any existing software will take only as much time as it takes to install on one PC. Because you have to install the software only on the server. Think – upgrading from one version of Tally to the next on a network of 25 PCS. The engineer will have to individually install Tally on each and every PC whereas in a thin client systems he will have to do it only once – on the server.
• Each person has their own files,settings and preferences.
• Since the thin client is only a terminal and not a complete computer, all the user settings , preferences and files are saved on the server itself and not on the users computer. So in case a particular users computer hardware is down , the user can sit on any terminal and just login with their username and will get the exact same environment to work on. So a users time is not wasted even if the computer is down.
• You save on hardware costs, maintenance costs and on electricity costs.