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Ah, the Raspberry Pi 3. So much love. So much power ... So turn it into a Windows thin client

Lee D Silver badge

I use the nComputing n300's - these are their previous product, I have the VGA versions but they made an HDMI version of the same thing later.

They're okay. Small. They log in reliably. Do RDP reliably. You can use them for anything office-y.

But increasingly with video or anything even vaguely taxing, they are just a waste.

When I started at my current school they were trying to run two IT suites from them using two HUGE Dell servers (each of which could barely service 20 clients, so long as you didn't try to run too many Chrome tabs).

My first action was to box them up and replace them with cheap, real machines. Never had one complaint and I hadn't been the first person to tell them it was necessary.

They're fine for what they are - and what we used them for in the end. Once we'd paid for them (there was a final payment of something like £200 pending), and you have the perpetual licence for the nComputing hardware/software (obviously you still have to pay for the RD licenses, but as a school you pay for those by buying one per full time teacher), they make rather nice digital signage machines. Tiny little VESA-mount things that just RDP in automatically and show whatever you tell them to show and can do audio too. I use them with Xibo.

The one trick they missed was a PoE-powered version.

But they are very much 90's technology wrapped in a cute box. A RPi 3 might solve some of the video acceleration issues, but it's not going to do much as they still just do RDP and the server does the bulk of the work. It does mean, however, that they should be as cheap as anything if you want me to touch them because otherwise why would I not just put an £25 RPi 3 in a £5 box and make my own version that isn't reliant on their silly software that does nothing more than let you use RDP anyway?

I was going to do that myself, with first gen RPi's, when I remembered I still had a box of the n300's lying around doing nothing.

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