Wireless is crap and slow in old stone buildings, and powerline networking is slow (about 15Mbps throughput on 500Mbps adaptors) when I cross areas between distribution boards.

So I've been installing Cat 6 cable and gigabit switches where I can and the results of wired file copies are amazing with surprisingly a sustained >900Mbps on file copies where the source is 7200 RPM RAID 0 pair and the destination is 7200 RPM laptop drive. Using remote desktop is like being there and file access over the network is like being on the machine itself. I might need a little powerline stuff to get wireless coverage still to avoid ripping the house decor apart. Organising the backup and all the media for home stuff and the work stuff to go onto the one always on PC is working well.

Next question is how to have workstations in various places without spending too much or having a multitude of computers to maintain.

Onto the QUESTION:

Is it better to remote desktop and use a thin client so I can reuse for example an old 2.5GHZ P4 with 768MB RAM 20GB IDE HDD? What about a Raspberry Pi when I can get one? Presently there isn't need for more than 1 concurrent user, but is there an easy way to let one PC present a remote desktop session and also be used in person?

I'm converting a cow shed to a lounge and I wondered if putting Raspberry Pis in ethernet wall sockets could allow some interesting options and have a bit of techno geek with a bit of chic design on the cheap to give some interest. Of course I can lay gigabit cable all over this as we convert.

Crazy and sensible ideas welcome, inspire me

 

Remote Desktop with windows only allows 1 concurrent user out of the box, but assuming you have multiple accounts on the pc there is a reg fix to allow a user to work on the pc itself and also have another user logged on via remote desktop......

 

http://www.techspot.com/guides/485-w...rent-sessions/

 

Thanks! Really neat.