Can XP Home work with old computers?

I've got a relatively new Dell computer with Win XP Home, and also several old Pentiums and 486's, all in a 3 person office of a small non-profit organization. Is there any way to enable these old computers to simply serve as dumb terminals from my XP Home machine, leaving programs and data to run on the XP Home machine? There are several users of the XP Home machine, all of whom have profiles on the XP Home machine, but it's obviously inconvenient when more than one person wants to use it at once. Thanks for any response.

 

Not exactly dumb terminals, they will need an OS installed, and networked, but you can host some apps on the fast machine, and run them via the network, as long as drives/folders are mapped.

 

Thanks for your response, "reboot ". Is the "hosting" that you speak of a standard feature of Windows networking? I haven't done any networking before. If so, can you give me some hints of where to start learning about it. And how can I tell which applications (Microsoft Office apps?) can in fact be hosted in this way? Thanks again.

 

OK, more detail:
The fast computer running XP has multiple drives/partitions, all shared openly on the network.
Each other computer has an OS (at least 95b and up).
Each computer wants to run programs, but the memory, and/or hard drive space may be limited.
Let's say you have a partition on the host for each client.
Open Explorer on each client, expand the Network neighborhood tree, and find it's partition on the host. Right click, and Map the drive/partition.
Now the client can install software on it's partition (hosted on the host), and run the software from there. This even allows Win9x to run NTFS hosted software. Basically, you're sharing the load of running the program between the host and the client. You could go as far as allowing the temp, and swap files of the clients to reside on the host, or even use part of it's RAM as a ramdrive for the client(s).
Anything that starts with Windows may give errors, if the host is not ON when the client is started, but as long as host is always on, then each client could access it's partition on the host, and you could even set up a mutual share for all clients, as well as peer to peer sharing of any other folders/drives on any/all of the computers on the LAN.
A small router, a few cables, and NetBEUI protocall would be ideal for this.

 

Thanks so much, PeteC and reboot. You've given me lots of information to get started. One final question: What is a "CAT cable "? Thanks again.

 

CAT 5 is the most common cable for networking.
CAT 6 is used for longer runs (over about 50 '), and is quite a bit more expensive.