Remote computing

jogold

jogold

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I'm looking for your feedback.

I have a user that travels a lot and does 90% of his computing by remote decktop connection to his office computer. He also watches movies, saved and streamed, and does do minimal Excel work and Powerpiont presentations.
He is now looking for a laptop, as light as possible.
SInce the lighter they are the more the cost and are delicate i wonder if just giving him a tablet with a keyboard wont just do the trick.
Half the weight at a third of the price.

What do you think?

thx
Jo
 
Surface pro would be good. But I mean, he'll still be paying for it. And if he wants to go that route he can get a Zenbook for the same price.
 
Still costs more than twice as much, weighs more and is more delicate - an issue when traveling.
I'm curious if anyone has done it with a 10" tablet and what the cons are.
 
The ASUSPRO B9440UA-XS51 is the lightest laptop I could find from my vendor at about 2.3 pounds. It's in the $1,000 cost range.

If cheap is the bigger selling point then maybe the Lenovo Winbooks closer to the $175 range, but, oddly, at a little more weight.

Be careful not to screw yourself trying to go out of your way here. Every time I've tried to come up with a light, powerful, low-cost solution for a customer it has ended up that the customer wasn't happy with any aspect. You get them in the mindset that what they want is cheap, so when they get it and realize it wasn't everything they wanted, then learn what it REALLY costs to get what they actually wanted they can end up being upset with you. A well informed customer is one who won't blame you if it doesn't work out.
 
very good advice.
he's actually ready to spend the money but I think its waste if he's just going to use it for remote desktop.
maybe I am being too nice and am shooting myself in the foot.
gotta speak to the cutomer.
 
If he's remoting into another pc to do his work, a small 10" tablet is going to be a PITA to use for any real length of time. Just too small a screen and too likely to run into scaling issues. I'd say stick with a decent 14" ultrabook. Dell and Lenovo make good ones that are strong (physically) and well supported. If he's using it for business, don't push for a cheap option or it will actually cost him a lot of money in the long run.
 
Or put differently, if a cheap solution costs him 12 minutes a day, that's an hour a week or more than a week a year. Assuming he's not a minimum-wager working remote, that's more than the possible hardware savings pretty fast. Also keep in mind that if that custom one-off solution has problems you're going to be charging them for troubleshooting on a remote device that you may not be able to simply do remote control on - how many hours of your time + the remote user's downtime does it take to cover that price difference?
 
Another thing to keep in mind if he's watching movies on it, a laptop you can just adjust the screen and set it down while a tablet must be held or precariously propped. From what I'm hearing here you shouldn't even be looking at a cheaper solution. He's happy to spend the money to get everything he wants. So why are you even looking into cheaper solutions that won't, or at least might not, give him everything he wants? Yeah, I understand that it might be more than he technically needs, but you're on your way to a customer who is unhappy with his purchase, creating problems for the customer, to fix a perceived problem that the customer doesn't even have.

Look at it this way. You get him what he's asking for and he has no problem with price, no problem with speed, no problem with usability and no problem with screen size. If you try to "fix" something that isn't broken you create a possible problem with speed, usability AND screen size to fix nothing.
 
jogold said:
Chromebook works with windows remote desktop?
Click to expand...

Correct, particularly on Chromebooks that also support Android apps. On Android, in addition to the free RDP client from Microsoft there's PocketCloud (from Dell/Wyse, plenty of RDP client experience there), Jump Desktop, and likely plenty of others.

I'm not sure what on the Chrome side works though - "Remote Desktop" got genericized in there, so it no longer really refers to Microsoft's RDP.
 
fencepost said:
I'm not sure what on the Chrome side works though - "Remote Desktop" got genericized in there, so it no longer really refers to Microsoft's RDP.
Click to expand...

Chrome's own RDP extension works in both directions. Chromebooks can control Windows machines and Windows machines can control Chromebooks. Their RDP is a bit clunky but is free and somewhat baked in and covers the basics well.
 
Hah, apparently it was discontinued in mid-2016, though I know it was still in the Google Play store until mid-2017 because that's when I got my current phone. That's a shame, it was the best of the Android RDP clients I used.

Dell's done a pretty good job of disappearing it, down to the level of having to hunt quite a bit to actually find confirmation that it was discontinued - the closest I found to official word: https://www.dell.com/community/Wyse-PocketCloud-for-Android/File-Transfer/td-p/4613811

I suspect its demise was part of the gradual digestion of Wyse after Dell purchased them, along with Dell's assorted financial drama (Public! Private! Maybe Public Again! and most recently Maybe We'll Be Bought Out By VMWare Which We Own 80% Of!).

Well, back in the day it was a pretty darn solid RDP client.
 
fencepost said:
Well, back in the day it was a pretty darn solid RDP client.
Click to expand...

Indeed. I loved it. I run sound for my church - we have a Presonus digital board, which can be remote controlled by an IOS app - so you could mix the sound from the middle of the house. It's a great setup. I used pocketcloud to remote from the iPad back into the soundroom computer which was running Audacity to record the service. It was a bulletproof solution while it lasted.
 
How does Jump Desktop compare to PocketCloud? I have some folks who were using it for a time, but switched them to PocketCloud because the software they were using basically required a scroll wheel or emulation of one and PocketCloud had that.

I don't use RDP from my phone or a tablet much anymore - tablet got obsolete and too slow, and we started locking down previously-open RDP.

Gah, makes me realize I probably bought PocketCloud in 2011 or maybe early 2012.
 
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