Sharing the computer

I'm going to be building a new computer and while on the plane ride home from work I saw and ad about being able to share your PC with others users, sort of a virtualization or Citrix session, only needing a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Well, plus the little gizmo to make it work.

I suppose Win 7 is too new for this type of app, unless it has something built-in.

Has anyone ever seen this type of device and if so I'm wondering is it worth while staying away from Win7 to be able to utilize such as system?

 

Here is the link to the site I saw in the SkyMall mag.

http://www.ncomputing.com/

Anyone?

 

Everthing old is new again - In pre-PC history there were two ways to 'share' computing resources. Time division and memory division. Time Division won out because it was and is more efficient. The catch is is it is 'division'. You get the power of one computer DIVIDED by 30. Almost full power but only for your 1/30 of the time. If the computer being shared is a powerful server with lots of memory and fast hard drives then this will work just like 'Terminal Services' which is happily supported by Server 2008 and Windows 7. If it is a system that is memory starved, you will be back in the land of 'slow' dial-up connections. Unless you want to give up the reason we run Windows - the Graphics. An old system can run 30 'text only' sessions, no mouse to worry about, no screen refresh problems, no fancy keyboard macros. In short, to share a system with multiple users at the same time it has to be a big dog or stay on the porch.

 

It does, of course, depend on how many people you want to share one machine, to what extent they will be using the machine simultaneously, what sort of tasks they will perform and, of course, how powerful the machine is.

Two people simultaneously video editing on a 1GB 2GHz processor isn't going to work whereas three or four people doing a bit of email and web browsing at different times on a 6GB core i7 960 would be fine.

You have to ask yourself, however; by the time you've bought the sharing device and done all the extra configuration required, whether you would actually be making any saving in time or cost compared to providing several small, low power, machines?