Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The possibilities here are endless. At home with the help of a Netgear WGE101 wireless bridge you could put one of these in every room and run it off your pc connected to the Internet. At the office, they make great systems for training, data entry or people that just need to read thier email or write a word document.

I have had one here in my office for a few months now running off a Windows 2000 pc with 1.2Ghz AMD 512MB memory and plain old IDE HD. Everyone that comes in the door plays with it one way in one way or the other and I have seen no impact on my windows workstation during these times. Another very neat thing is that you can hav all your windows open, turn the thing off, un plug it, plug it back in somewere else on the network and when it loads everything is still there. Which to me indicates that this is not a thin client device. It is a mutli-user remote desktop. At 189.00 or less, We plan on putting one everwhere a simple pc is needed. I did have initial install problems as well because I let it check the Internet for a newer version during the install and it hosed the install process up. So don't do that. Support was little help either. I just erased it all and started over not using the Internet check and it all works fine.

Maybe someone else who bought one of these had better luck than me, but after 3 hours wanking around on it, I finally threw in the towel, and decided to return it. Here's what happened:

Followed the directions in the documentation. After installing the terminal server software on my system, the first thing that I noticed is that my AthonXP 2500+ system with 512MB took about twice as long to boot and ran sluggishly thereafter. Getting the terminal server management window to come up took a minute and a half, and after any little adjustment to a setting, there was a long delay where the mouse cursor would disappear when moved over the management window, while the software very slowly responded.

The next problem was a message from the terminal server software complaining about a "user.exe" mismatch, with instructions telling me either to uninstall my latest Windows Update patches, or download the latest fix from the Ncomputing site. After downloading the updated termserv fix file, the termserv download management program would hang. Canceling the download program would make the downloaded fix file disappear. After several attempts trying different save locations, filenames, etc. I finally resorted to killing the download manager with TaskMan, which left the downloaded fix file in place--this allowed me to install the updated terminal server software.

The result of that was that my host PC didn't complete its boot upon restart. Held down the power button until my host machine powered down, then restarted again. This time my system booted, but the speed was even slower, although the error message went away.

(As an aside, the manual states that there may be times when their terminal server software won't be kept up to date with the latest Windows Update patches, potentially leaving you in the situation of having to choose between running the latest security fixes, or your terminal. That made me uncomfortable.)

After finally getting the terminal server software to run without obvious errors on my host PC, I spent another frustrating chunk of time trying to get the terminal itself to work. Even after assigning static IP addresses as instructed to both the terminal and the PC host, the terminal never was able to make a connection to the host. It would see that the host exsited, but could not connect to it. This was over a standard 10/100 switch.

3 hours horsing around with all this was the limit. I never bothered to call DoubleSight's tech support, I just unregistered and unloaded the terminal server software from my host PC (which at least uninstalled properly) and repacked the terminal for return. If it doesn't at least work in a basic way out of the box, I'm not into wasting my time paying to be someone's beta tester.

Summary and recommendation: Steer clear of this one. With new low-end PCs hitting $350 for a decent system, $200 is a lot to pay for something like this. If it was reliable (or if it even worked at all) and cost $75, it might be a good value, but as it is, even if the terminal could be made to log on, it's just not worth the performance hit on the host system. Just get a new standalone low-end PC instead.

It has no USB port; any company that implemented PC Expanion is quietly trying to prevent company's digital files to be transported home.

Also, the implementation of PC Expanion is a scheme for the company's IT guy to gain greater control over what you are doing on the company's Desktop computer - remotely from the comfort of his and only his network server computer - if he disabled java script, then you won't be able to access certain email server; without java script, you also won't be able to run personal errands on websites that possesses pop-ups.

Causes great inefficiency in the running of the IT department, at least in the initial stage, much customization has to be done on the network server. For example, when my terminal was first hooked up to PC Expanion, my monitor resolution was defaulted at 640x480. In order to increase the resolution, my guess is that it requires the network server to install some kind of driver. Unfortunately, my company has only one IT guy, and understandably is very busy taking care of everybody else's computing problems, hence it will probably take another 9000 years before my wish ascend towards the top of his to-do list.