Some Thin Client Commonalities and Limitations

Let's talk about some things that are common to nearly all thin clients, and buying them on Ebay.

The biggest limitation of all the units I have and use except for the MaxSpeed MaxTerm X500 is the lack of an ATA connection for a hard drive. Instead there is a 44-pin connection for a DOM flash drive. Flash drives are slow and also wear out the more times you write on them, like a few thousand times, and so you don't want to be constantly updating them.

The most direct work-around for this is to use a "Live" Linux distro from a thumb drive or a CDROM drive with a USB connection. In fact and effect you boot from a live distro which loads all the immediately needed stuff into RAM without disturbing the flash drive module at all. As additional things are needed, they are loaded into RAM from the CD or thumb drive. It's slow, same as a flash drive, but reading from them doesn't wear them out, just writing to them does.

The next step is to boot from a host, another Linux computer you have running 24/7.  This is effectively using the thin client exactly as it was designed to be used. Otherwise you will need to start using the flash drive module to store all the details of where you left off just before you shut the unit down. So you keep these very low power units up 24/7. So you are looking at booting from the thumb drive when you do shut down for as long as you use the unit. That's the long and short of it.

A severe limitation of the HP t5520 unit is its 128mb soldered on the board memory module. You can buy anything on Ebay including 500mb and larger memory sticks for this unit, but there is NO PLACE TO PLUG THEM IN! A variation on this theme is full size sticks of memory being offered for a specific model of thin client when that unit will only accept lap top type memory. Some units, not all, will only run on low density memory chips. I mention this here as a warning.

All the early thin clients use VIA cpus and chip sets since they were the first to be designed with very low power use in mind. There is good news and good news : These chip sets have very high resolution video units that take the Linux Open-Chrome driver, very nice AC-97 audio units and high speed Rhine-II network units that Linux provides drivers for. Typically there is an abundance of high speed USB ports for such things as thumb drives, floppy drives, CDROM drives, Zip drives, keyboards, mice, ....