Thin Clients

At our Syracuse University Real-World Labs® in Syracuse, N.Y., we configured server systems with Dell Computer Corp. OptiPlex GX1 500-MHz systems with 256 MB of RAM for the Windows-based products. Each server was installed with the same configuration and services of Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server with Terminal Server and Service Pack 1. We used Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.0 as our Web server.

We tested the two Unix products on a 300-MHz Sun Microsystems Ultra Enterprise 10 with 256 MB of RAM. We used Sun Solaris 2.6 with Apache Web server version 1.314. Since SPARC systems and Intel systems cannot be compared fairly, we have not included performance test parameters for the Solaris products against the Windows products tested in this review.

We tested the products using Wintach 1.2, a somewhat old but useful testing program, to benchmark the screen refresh and redraw rates on the thin-client systems. Wintach was installed on the server platform and run from a client running Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0. Each application was run in a window at 800 by 600 pixels. Additionally, we looked at the products for client install size. Products that installed larger distributions would get lower scores, but we decided not to publish these statistics as it was very difficult to determine how much space was actually being used by the individual client components.