PC Expanion Multi-user Network Computing Terminal (OS L100)

by Global Marketing Partners

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0007L719U
• Item model number: OSL100
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 14, 2005

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great for offices looking to upgrade, February 28, 2005

By 

BlueByte - See all my reviews

This review is from: PC Expanion Multi-user Network Computing Terminal (OS L100) (Personal Computers)

Any type of business can take advantage of this product. This thing is small and obviously dead quite. I have been stress testing one of these and there are a few things that need to be fixed in the future.

Video is awful, and it is not the system or network they are being served from. My network peaked at 25% with a full screen video trying to be played with a PCExpanion, CPU was 10%, and more then 512MB of RAM free.

Audio works fine no stuttering or pauses, but it is low quality and there is a bit of noise coming through.

The refresh of the screen could be bumped up just a little as well, but only because I am expecting quite a bit from this unit. People will have no problem typing or scrolling through pages and doing other office work.

I imagine these problems could be solved by them just upgrading the CPU or code in the current system. The audio controller should just completely be replaced as it is of low quality for a $199 US product.

Now that the bad is out of the way, this unit is actually quite good for a business environment. The quality of the screen output is actually quite good and is better then XP's remote desktop. The network utilization is less then 1% in most cases peaking at 5%. The CPU and RAM are the same obviously as running it locally, so if your PC is up to date and has enough RAM you will be set.

The keyboard and mouse respond quickly and is no comparison to the much more sluggish remote desktop.

I believe DoubleSight was actually being quite conservative with limiting the total number to 10 units. If you setup a XP machine with duel CPU's and at least 10K RPM drives with 4GB of RAM, 1Gb LAN, you could easily serve at least 30 machines and I think it could hit 50 off of one machine.

With all that said I hope they upgrade the processing unit in this thing to play video, as this could sneak into the home as well with MS Media Center PC's serving up extenders why not have them serve a few of these things as well.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine unit for small to medium business, August 13, 2005

By 

RockurSocks (Houston) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: PC Expanion Multi-user Network Computing Terminal (OS L100) (Personal Computers)

Hello all,
I was just surfing Amazon one day and ran across this unit. It sounded real nice, but it seemed too good to be true. As always I enjoy new toys and this one looked promising, so I bought one. It arrived today and guess what, it works....lol. I was surprised to say the least, but the graphics are allot slower than I'm used to for gaming. I would suggest to anyone with the need for remote workstations using accounting software, word processing, or just surfing the net....Get it, you will be glad you did. It works well with my new Dell Precision 6700 workstation with Dual 3.0 GHz Xeon 800's, 2 Gigs of DDR2 400Mhz, Dual 73 Gig Ultra 320 10,000 rpm Scsi drives running Windows XP Pro. This is the ticket, just buy one Great computer and remote out all the rest. The truth is: I followed the instructions and it worked fine for me. This is not a gamers unit because of the lack of graphics speed. For office use, I highly recommend this unit.

2.0 out of 5 stars Installation headache, May 29, 2005

By 

E. Moody (napa, ca) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: PC Expanion Multi-user Network Computing Terminal (OS L100) (Personal Computers)

Be forewarned - this product is vulnerable to the vagaries of microsoft update patches. I spent over a day pulling my hair out trying to get this to work. The install kept crashing my computer and the uninstall really screwed things up. I finally saw that the manual says that product updates often lag windows update patches so I uninstalled Windows Installer 3.1 (the most recent Windows Update download), reloaded the expanion software and it worked. One other piece of advice - when starting the install process, there is an option to download a more recent version of the software from the Internet. Don't do it - just load the software from the cd and then update it once it's installed. The product seems to work well, but I am wary about how it will react when new Windows updates are installed. Because there is no customer support on weekends, i have no idea if they are helpful. Their web support and product manual do leave a lot to be desired.