Microsoft to Release a Thin-Client Windows XP

repking writes "I'm reading on Brian Madden's Thin Client Web that Microsoft is about to release (don't know exactly when) two new versions of Windows XP targeting the thin-client market (This products ARE NOT the Lite XP versions that Microsoft is about to release on certain countries like Brazil). Codenamed Eiger and Mönch, these two new releases would let you 'convert' old PC into thin-client Devices. Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?"

Comments

Small buisness

[maotx]

As a sysadmin for a small buisness (~100 employees and growing fast) I've been trying to push thin-clients for a while now. My manager and the other sysadmin is very reluctant to pursue this solution but I cannot find any reason why a recpetionist, data entry, or accounting needs a new, full featured desktop. Thin-clients are rising in popularity again and it won't be long for them to become a familar site in small to large buisnesses. The only reason I can find to purchase Microsoft's XP thin-client is for those of us who would use it with terminal services. Terminal server requires a license for each connecting client, which a Windows OS has. One of the arguments I've heard against thin clients is the licensing fees for terminal service. Why purchase a $200 thin client and then a CAL license[1]when you can purchase a $400 full fledge desktop with XP? If my manager wasn't so strong against Office alternatives[2] a Linux server with OO.org would save the company a fortune. We wouldn't have to worry about costly maintenance[3] or extradanory licensing fees with an OSS thin-client.

[1] can't recall how much a CAL costs
[2] we're a government contractor and worried about compatibility
[3] defrag, spyware, updates, corruption, etc

Re:Small buisness

[bluelip]

I'm a gov't employee and I won't support anything that comes from a vendor in a MS-only format. I can nearly guarantee it won't even be opened unless it is straight text.

Put that in your boss's pipe and have him/her smoke it.

Re:Small buisness

[JoeShmoe]

Starting with Windows 2003, Microsoft now licenses Terminal Services separately. You get 0 license credit for having XP, even XP Pro. Previously, under Windows 2000 Terminal Services any 2000 Pro client gets granted a license from a free unlimited pool.

Also, starting with Windows 2003, you have to decide between per-user or per-device pricing and you can't switch later. This means either having five computers with as many people logging in and out as can share them or having five users who can connect from any particular machine. Of course, this is all separate from the required client access license for Windows 2003 itself.

A Terminal Service license will run the average business about $84; that's the cost under Microsoft's Open License program. Huge companies under the Select program will no doubt save some money, and I think you can save more by signing up for software assurance.

So the bottom line is that since you are already paying for a license, why do you want to pay extra for a full XP license that is doing nothing more than passing keyboard and mouse signals to the server? It makes no sense. Odds are thay any computer you have came with a license for SOME kind of Windows, and since they can all run the client, that seems the obvious choice.

Regarding remote management, I haven't found anything in XP that isn't cheaper and better from third-party products. The only thing I would actually want Microsoft to do is freakin make an XP product that can run from a USB key or a bootable CD. That would be a valid competitor to the various thin-client projects.

So, I don't plan on getting any of these new XP versions unless they are so ridiculously cheap that I would do it just to not have to remember if a particular computer is running 98, 98SE, ME or XP Home .

-JoeShmoe
.

Re:Small buisness

[ikkonoishi]

My college for one would. We have about 30 PCs devoted to letting students access the Internet, research libraries, and write papers.

Currently these are basically mid-range desktops with almost everything possible locked down to prevent everything from the bumbling click all installation prompts luser to the third year "I want to uninstall windows from this machine and run my own custom coded OS." geek.

If instead of an actual computer they could just present an Internet terminal, and remote word app for less than the hardware costs of the boxes they use now, they would jump at the chance.

Re:Small buisness

[Thaelon]

You neglect to mention that *using* thin clients sucks monkey nuts.

They redraw painfully slowly, they render simple bitmaps painfully slowly, where I work Firefox currently does not work on the thinclients (though it used to?). Certain applications (UltraEdit most notably) are a nightmare to scroll around in on a thinlclient. In certain cases turning on track changes in Word causes the thing to grind to a halt. Characters appear 1-2 seconds after you hit the key, Gmail's Login page brings the thing to its knees.

They have mine so locked down I can't adjust my own god damn mouse sensitivity, the admin has to log into the thinclient himself and adjust it.

Not to mention if one person uses all the terminal server's CPU everyone else's thinclient freezes up.

I would kill for a real PC at work and I've got the newest model on site. I hate running on a machine that can't keep up with me.

Sounds to me like you did your thesis purely from the admin standpoint and forgot about the poor suckers who have to use the godforsaken things.

Tell me again how they're, ergonomic?

Re:Small buisness

[10Ghz]

1. Cheaper machines: have you taken into account the price of the server(s)? Have you taken into account that server price grows EXPONENTIALLY with the number of user it can handle, while desktop price increase is LINEAR?

Just about all organisations need servers. So the difference between the two approaches is not that great. It's not like you need to have server in thin-client environment, but you do not need them in fat-client environment. Both environments have servers.

And in some installations I built, the "servers" were actually regural 1GHz desktops (the installtion was not mission-critical). In fact, it was just 1GHz AMD Duron-machine! Hardly expensive even back then! Add it handled regural tasks just fine.

2. Reliability: again, you are only looking at what you want. Remember you need additiona infrastructure! If the server or the network breaks, everything breaks.

If the servers or network break in regural fat-client environments, you will also have problems. Again, the difference between the two is not that big. Both will have problem if network-services go down. And the problem can me reduced by careful planning and redundancy.

3. Ease of service: But what happens if the server breaks?.

Answer: redundant servers. What happens if the server goes down in a regural fat-client environment? You will have problems regardless.

4. Longevity: New applications means new and more powerful server iron, with new cooling systems, etc., every few years.

Or not. And the servers are usually better specced that desktops are. Even if software-requirements go up, you do not have to upgrade the servers. And if you have some apps that need REALLY powerful hardware (well, running that sort of software on the clients would be expensive as well, since you would need hi-end workstations), you could have a dedicated server just for that app.

And again: you have to just handle few servers, instead of dozens of workstations.

5. Ergonomy: there are plenty of almost silent desktops with very small footprint.

And they cost extra. And I'm not talking about "almost" silent, I'm talking about completely silent systems. Can you provide any links to systems that you had in mind?

Been There, Dont That.

[spotter]

I did that 3 years ago! Fit a linux kernel, X (vesa, so should work everywhere), dhcp and rdesktop on bootable floppy image (though the linux kernel only had one ethernet driver compiled in), basically a thin client you can take with you and would work on most computers (albiet network issues) you can find.

people can still get the image from

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~spotter/floppy.bin

though I give no warrenties for it still working, as haven't looked at it in years (and probably needs to be manually setup once it boots). though I recall it working well enough to get me an A on the project it was for.

the idea was that this floppy would give you a full screen X (via tiny X's Xvesa) and you'd run rdesktop full screen on top of it.

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[EnderWiggnz]

first, i'm an engineer at one of the major thin client manufacturers, i really dont need a definition of a thin client.

vesa is way too slow, unless the apps that you are running are specifically designed for it. Wyse did this with their 1200LE product... unix-ish thinger, with a vesa buffer on top, running an uber-hacked ica... and its still slow.

you would really be surprised at the amount of optimizations that you can throw at a (semi) proper graphics chipset, so much that it is well worth while to take the extra cost in flash to carry the proper drivers.

also, both the rdp and ica client do not rely solely on throwing bitblt's at the screen, but rely on caching fonts, renderring tricks, and other cacheing tricks to lower bandwidth consumption.

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[spotter]

yes, I know that. I've read the rdp spec backwards and forwards (as I have been in the employ of MSFT (after I made the above project) and hence while I use rdesktop as an application, I don't hack on it).

but again, I stand by my statement that while protocols like rdp do support some set of raster operations (ex: fills of a region), at the end of the day the current model of thin clients is most blt'ing to screen, especially with graphic heavy apps like a web browser. Things like caching prove the point, as one is caching rasterized font bitmaps and hence vesa doesn't care about, as at the end of the day those operations are mostly blt'ing the cached font bitmap to the screen or whatever other bitmap you've cached.

Thin clients might be changing to the point where my project isn't a good example anymore (i.e. getting fatter w/ more functionality, such as video acceleration, as you can't efficiently pump many different videos worth of pixels on a single lan today, though that could change as well), but I'd still think its perfectly usable today (though as I said, haven't tried that floppy lately, so it's only an intellectually masterbating type of thought)

But that's really besides the point. I used vesa because it can run anywhere, as the point was a floppy you could carry anywhere.

Today w/ things like USB keys I'd probably make a knoppix like setup that autodetected the appropriate x driver to use.

I don't think MS can compete

[digitalride]

Unless you have a ton of old reliable boxen to run LTSP or other thin client solutions on, thin clients are way too expensive new for what you get. Local Multi-user systems are much more efficient. Especially when running 4 people on one box, open source (free) software is the only way to avoid killer software costs, so I don't think Microsoft can compete in this arena. You can get new hardware (and all the software you need) for 3 or 4 users for less than $1000 with an open source solution. For more info on local multi-user systems, check out http://groovix.com/ (that's my company, so obviously I'm biased!)

All about .net, right?

[ExileOnHoth]

"Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?"

No. Microsoft never heard of PXES or ThinStation. They are absolutely desperate to deploy the .net framework more widely, so people will actually start to develop for it. They fear people will never deliberately download and try to install it on their older boxes without something like this.

Be interesting to see how this works out for them. I won't lose sleep over it.

"Release *On* Certain Countries"

[adavies42]

I like that. Sounds kind of like "release the dogs".

Re:And a great bonus would be

[VoidWraith]

Well, thats true in theory, but where I go to school all the Windows computers use a Citrix server. It is abysmal. The computers will sometimes hang while saving files, crashing the computer and trashing the file. Terrible for my physics class. (not that every computer does this, but a few do. And the server has a tendency for forgetting things... I think its because the tech department is too backup-happy.)

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[glazed]

I refurbish computer for our local school district to give away. Right now I'm getting a lot of low end P3 machines, so that's what a lot of companies are getting rid of.

Now, to get another couple of years out of these machines it generally requires a drive replacement around this time, the BIOS is usually years out of date, and the worst of all, most of the fans are dead/dying.

The current workstations aren't going to give another couple years. Something with no HDD or active cooling is needed.

What about OEMs??

[malraid]

However huge Microsoft is, they still need the OEMs, and I don't think they be very happy about this...Recycle old hardware?? A new Windows version that doesn't require a hardware upgrade to run more or less adecuate?? Time will tell,,

WTF....

[Lxy]

Has no one here heard of "Windows XP embedded edition"? That thing's been out for at least a year, maybe two.

I run Hpaq t5700 thin clients. These boxes are nothing more than a Crusoe processor and a small ATA flash disk. You load the XP embedded image onto the thin client, customize it, and it's ready to go. Footprint? Under 200 MB. That sounds large for a thin client, but this is truly Windows XP with a lot of crap stripped out. IE and MSN messenger are included, as well as basic terminal emulation and other normal thin client apps. All in all, not bad for 200 MB and it does almost everything I need it to. For a more functional box you'll want to grab drivers.cab from a real XP machine, but aside from that it's ready and waiting for your apps.

Re:This won't work

[El Gordo Motoneta]

I've been (for the most part) responsible for the implementation
of the second larget thin-client rollout in my country. In fact,
I'm still in that position, since we still have two whole buildings
left to migrate.

The average box in this company is a Pentium II, 333Mhz, with 64MB of RAM
with Trident PCI VGA.

They are way too slow to run a modern desktop (before we started the
thin client rollout, they were mostly running their original Windows 95
installation), but they are fast enough to run Xfree 4.3 with accelerated
2D Trident drivers. They run *beautifully*. The large amount or RAM
let's us add small webservers and telnet servers to the thin client disk
images, and a Samba nmbd process so they have a NetBIOS name. We are using
Terminal services on a Windows 2003 Server to provide a modern and relatively
secure OS.

So far, the absolutely biggest complaint we have ever had is that Office
2003 does not include the "Office shortcut bar" (boo-f*ng-hoo) so we ended
up installing the damn bar from an Office XP CD we had lying around.

The users are happy with their "new computers". They crash a lot less, Word
and Excel open instantly, and if power goes out or the machine breaks, their
whole session is intact. Help Desk is a lot easier now: When a thin client
craps out, the techies just dump it and plug another one in, turn it on,
and the user keeps on working as if nothing happened.

locked down? yes, they are. Very. But in this particular company there are
nearly no "power users" and they barely even notice things the lack of a
wallpaper. They just power it up and use it to work.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[crapnutassneck]

Yeah, never saw wide deployment. We have over 3,000 remote logins to our Citrix farm a day from diskless thin clients around the world.

Re:Competing with Citrix

[rigga]

Im not sure that Citrix and Microsoft are competing. Citrix offers an ADD-ON to MS TS. Without Terminal Server Citrix is useless. CItrix is a suite of management and deployment tools for Microsoft Terminal Server. Microsoft loves Citrix. Why every new shiny Citrix server has a copy of MS-TS running on it. Plus for every Citrix License that you have MS gets to sell you a TS Cal. They are laughing all the way to the bank.

RiGgA

Good answer

[C0d1ngM0nk3y]

My Chyropractor's receptionist uses a computerised typewriter! When I saw this I chuckled to myself and thought how long it had been since I saw one of those but then I thought: why would they need anything else on the front desk? All she ever does is type letters and write down apointments in a little black book - you don't need a 1.3Ghz processor, 500 Meg memory, DVD r/w, flat screen plasma monitor and the latest in fancy-smancy graphics cards to do that! People use technology for it's own sake these days.

Essentially this...

[amcdiarmid]

This is the same crap deal as the WinCE devices that wyse and Boundless used to sell. Essentially, rather than buy a linux device (with Rdesktop, and 5250 emulation, and Xserver, and a local browser) - you purchase a WinCE, EmbeddedXP, MoenchXP, etc-OS-device from M$ (With IE and RDP only) and get the RDP portion of the TS license with it.

It is a play to keep people from mass producing a nano-itx/Linux thin-client

IBM's strategy, ten years later.

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds strangely familiar, somehow.

Of course, WSOD was, as the article notes, just a way to buy a netboot environment in shrinkwrap, but what do you think these two 'distributions' of XP will be?

how thin clients work for me...

[way2trivial]

I have XP Pro on my main CPU

My crappy windows ME laptop has a cheapo 15" lcd attached to it, sitting out in my shed- with a g network adapter... running a 2055 hack, I can- with one of the two monitors in my shed, run a full screen XP session and a full screen windows ME session at the same time-- the ME session serves up any video stream (rdc sucks at motion video) and stat monitor on my wlan connection- the XP screen affords me power to run whatever I run....

Consider- I can run any of my commercial software while my wife is inside running the same commercial software... one license....

this has extended the useful life of my winme laptop immesurably-- if it powers up, and runs mstsc.exe- it's a windows xp machine...

that's what will mess over the hardware manufacturers...

A lotta folks are annoyed at oracle for charging a per-processor fee, and counting dual cores as two processors.... I say-- fuck em! pay for two processors, and connect to it from 50 machines!