Anybody build their own thin client terminals?

[mooseAndSquirrel]

For work, I've been looking at Wyse thin client terminals and they're pretty cool. With Windows Server 2003 you can have 5 terminal connections.

So I was thinking this would be excellent for home. Put in one server (and the expensive OS license is covered by my MSDN subscription) and then have the wife's PC, kid's PC, kitchen PC, etc. be these thin terminals. These things have no fans and produce almost no heat. They're quite small and completely silent.

The problem is the Wyse are about $329 w/o a monitor. For that, you can get a "real" PC, albeit underpowered, from Dell (and also hotter and noisier).

I cracked open a Wyse and it is very simple. Something has a heat sink on it (I'm guessing the graphics chip) but other than that it's a small "motherboard" with USB, keyboard, mouse, VGA and ethernet connectors. I guess the Citrix and RDC capabilities are in firmware somewhere. But all in all it looks like maybe $40 worth of parts. I've built plenty of PCs, so I'm now wondering if this sort of gear can be bought in parts and assembled.

Anyone ever done that?

 

[vegetation]

You could put together an old P133 (passive cooled) system and use it as a light browser, along with terminal client. Take out the harddrive and use a compact flash card in IDE direct mode for solid state activity. Granted, you'll probably still have a power supply fan but if it's something like an old Dell desktop PS, it hardly makes any noise at all. That's what I've done to one of my systems. Best if you can try to score a system locally as shipping costs will probably be more than what the system will sell for itself.

Another alternative, is an old internet appliance like the I-opener. It can be hacked to run windows or linux. With solid state storage, it would be completely silent plus it has a cute little lcd (passive matrix) screen. Downside is that it's a bit more expensive, poor quality display screen, and probably not worth the effort if you aren't into hacking apart a system like that.

 

[EeyoreX]

I would think that what looks like "$40 worth of parts" is unfortunately much more. There probably isn't much demand for home/self built systems of this type (at least not enough to justify mass market penetration of this type of "super-mini motherboard". I know there are several mATX and FlexATX motherboards, but these are mostly small "regular" motherboards. You can likely find lower-end/older boards like this and build a quiet system (my PII never had active cooling for example) but I can't even begin to guess how much this would cost or where/if you could find these. It seems to me that building this kind of system, while likely technically speaking, is easy, finding the parts would likely be costly.

As for Dell... My experience is that these PCs are nearly silent. I work with an OptiPlex GX110 PIII here at work, and until recently (the fan is screwed and IT won't fix/replace it) it was so quiet that the most noise I would hear is when I accessed the CD-ROM drive. Even Dell's desktops are fairly quiet, considering many use just one fan in adition to the HSF. When you start adding high powered graphics cards it gets louder, but a "low-end" Dell is almost silent, IMO. And probably cheaper than finding all the parts for building a thin client at home.

\Dan