
Repurposing Thin Clients - MadcapJake
http://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/index.shtml
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DanBC
This website is an amazing collection of information. I love this kind of
site: someone with a deep interest gathers a huge amount of information.

It deserves more interest.

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sliken
Favorite thin client I've found is the asus chromebox. It was $150 (now
cheaper), can easily install a larger SSD and 2 SOdimms (max at least 16G
ram), and is easy to install ubuntu or whatever floats your boat.

Even comes with a ANSI hanger, so you can mount if off the back of common LCD
panels.

Avoid the HP version, half the memory bandwidth, half the memory capacity, and
less USB ports.

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rektide
I've been keeping radio silence on these because it seems like many
Chromeboxes are no longer in production and I don't want to impact
availability, but yeah, these things are very impressive.

It's a little more difficult to work with than most PCs because they come with
ChromeOS with runs Coreboot. Thankfully Mr. Chromebox has done a bunch of work
building UEFI and legacy boot bioses packaged with friendly install scripts -
[https://mrchromebox.tech/](https://mrchromebox.tech/) \- but it's still a bit
of work. It's really a very interesting effort- earlier this year he started
working on upgrading the firmware for the embedded controller too.

This definitely weened me off my crushes for HP thin clients & the AMD
embedded processors. Interesting systems, but the price point even in
secondary markets stayed pretty high, especially given the modest performance.
Back then the small but very competent GPU was a decent differentiator, some
old units are probably still better than many of the Chromeboxes (which from
experience I can say need more GPU muscle to do an adequate 4k).

Consumer/commercial mini-PCs continue to show up and come down-market. Given
how good $400 laptops are (really astoundingly good), it's hard to imagine the
mini-PC market keeping what seem like it's plush margins intact. The pressure
to go down-market is big, and frankly it seems like a cost saving measure to
sell smaller PCs than bigger ones- as consumer adoption increases I look
forward to seeing competitiveness among small PCs growing.

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justusw
In a similar vein, SpritesMods built a cluster out of old Windows terminals:
[https://spritesmods.com/?art=wtcluster](https://spritesmods.com/?art=wtcluster)

