win xp pro - remote desktop - min specs?

[oupei]

hey guys,

I wanna buy a new computer htpc style for the home theater but since that would go in a closet in the basement, I'm having a hard time justifying the purchase to my parents. But if I did this, could I use remote access from a pentium 90? What would be the bottleneck, the P-90 or the 100mbps ethernet? with remote access, all the work is done on the host pc and only video/peripheral data is transferred, right? Even if the p90 is the bottleneck, would this still be enough to significantly improve the performance of the P-90? Finally, what if I use a PII-450 instead of a P-90? btw, it's only gonna be general usage stuff on remote access. If I wanna play games or something, I can go to the basement.

 

[Falloutboy]

it will work for basic stuff but anything that uses the graphics card or uses video overlay (any video you play) will not work thru remote access ethernet is to slow to transmit that much uncompressed video.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Falloutboy
it will work for basic stuff but anything that uses the graphics card or uses video overlay (any video you play) will not work thru remote access ethernet is to slow to transmit that much uncompressed video.

I have 100Mb ethernet. I can watch movies (barely) thru RA. Sure, it's slow and skippy at times, but it works. You wouldn't want to play a game, but for moving windows around and for quick looks at videos it's fine. You'll never watch a full-length video or DVD, tho, or play a game.

 

[unlockthesource]

100mbps is way more than enough for decent remote desktop. Of course, it wont be anything like sitting at the actual computer. P-90 will be slow but that goes without saying. Dont plan on playing video over RDP because your frame rates will be terrible. The sudio probably wont sync up either.

For video, music and any other streaming media, i would recommend setting up file sharing. Of couse if you have access to Windows 2003 server, you can stream the media. If you have windows file sharing enables without restrictions, FTP and possibly HTTP severs also running, you probably wont need to use RDP all that often.