Ideal setup for a school computer lab?

[colonydata]

Originally Posted by schwags

As a side note, my wife has an ipad3 with the 'gumdrop' case, and it has been toddler proof for a month now. I have an original ipad in the otterbox extreme case and my 3 year old has been knocking it about for over a year with no problems. We also have an ipad 2 in a Griffin Survivor case that my toddler literally throws around, and it is in perfect condition. I think that ipads in the classrooms would work, with the appropriate protection in place.

you forget to factor in malicious intent, which will happen. i really do not see the purpose of deploying Ipads into a lab setting where the main uses will be word processing, research etc where a traditional pc would be a better fit.

now put a set of ipads on a cart that teachers check out for specific activities in the class room. that makes sense.

[schwags]

I guess a cart idea is what I was thinking of the whole time. Right now we have a cart of laptops that can be checked out by the teachers, but they are always in disrepair from the kids picking the keys off etc that the teachers do not use them. Also, they leave the damn cart plugged in ALL the time and kill the batteries even after I have tried to explain that they need to be charge cycled. I don't know if ipads would be much better, but at least they don't have keys to pick off...

[cyabro]

Have you looked at the new Windows MultiPoint Server 2001 from Microsoft?

You can get thin clients now that support the new RemoteFX which supposedly supports video etc over the RDP session.

[colonydata]

thats an interesting concept. the only problems i see, is you would still have more physical desktop computers to manage. from what i have read it looks like you are also limited to hp hardware. i also wonder about how much centralized management ability you have when administering multiple servers.

also i would assume your locked into windows. which say your school taught a intro to unix class and needed linux pcs. might not be able to do that with multipoint, but with a ESX or Xen server its just a matter of creating a linux vm and adding it to the desktop pool.

[schwags]

We have decided to go with the ncomputing solution. After getting a demo unit and hooking it up to my shop server, it was obvious that is was exactly what we were looking for. When I get the lab done, I will TRY to report back about the success...

[bfgfdgs]

The Microsoft Dumb terminals work well. You need only enable Remote Desktop Services as far as I remember. Basically, they are capable out of the box of running the Remote Desktop Client... that's it.

You need TS licencing though.

_________________

[drpcfix]

Have you done the install?? I'm really curious to hear about how this went and what you learned..

We've tried thin clients a number of times, the wrong way, and never had any really successful deployments.

Things like slowness, online video problems, and edge-case needs caused too many problems.

(it would help knowing all the problems up front so you could set expectations I suppose)

[RedFoxComp]

Windows Multipoint Server 2011 with HP thin clients. It was made for exactly this.