Windows CE Thin Clients

I was surfing eBay, seems to be my favorite thing to do since I gave up the porn sites, and saw that someone was selling a brand new AMD 50x15 the other day. He was selling it for $6 plus shipping, which was another $20.

You could have had the whole thing for less than $27. And no one bid on it or bought it.

And then I began to understand why. There are literally hundreds of thin clients running various versions of CE for sale these days...many for less than $20 delivered.

Some of them run not at the 366mHz of the AMD PIC, but at 800mHz. Can you imagine how fast a CE5 or CE6 machine runs at 800mHz!!!! And they come with plenty of memory as well.

It is just a shame that all of them seem to be x86 and not ARM based. Then you would have had a tremendous software library available already.

Still, the PIC was a great machine for word processing since it came with Softmaker Office on it. Too bad that Opera Mini didn't come in a CE x86 version. CE6, like CE.NET 4.2 and CE5 only has IE6 on it and we all know how outdated that is. If it weren't for the ARM version of Opera Mini, we would be totally lost.

Anyways...was just surfing and thinking....

BTW, I see a lot of people turning these into MS-DOS machines...oh what fun!

I've thought about picking up one of the CE thin clients for kicks, but as I recall, they're pretty heavily locked down on the base image, aren't they?

I remember my PIC had an issue with WiFi as well. There was only one type of wireless adapter that would work at the time. I can't remember if it would to WPA.

You can get into the OS easy enough, depending on which model you own.

The USR MaxG worked with it just fine Yoldering, but it only supported WPA, not WPA2. It was CE5 on the PIC.

The newer Wyse terminals are ARM based, but there is no CE build for them. Wonder if one of the netbook firmware builds could be used....then it would be CE6 and everything available...

The CE6 build supports WPA2, too, IIRC, right? I seem to recall my Sylvania ubiquitous CE6 netbook clone did at least.

I'll let you know...I picked one up for "kicks" myself and it should be here today or tomorrow...

Well I've been playing with my HP T5520 thin client. Not much to talk about really. Just a simple CE5.0 machine that runs at 800mHz. It natively supports 16 or 32 bit color with 3 defaults of 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 pixels.

Good things about it is it comes with a pretty comprehensive JetCet printer drivers built into it, so I had no problem just plugging in an old HP Deskjet Printer, and even though it didn't have my particular model, I just picked one of the Deskjets for my choice and it printed text and graphics just fine.

This model has 128mb of RAM built onto the motherboard...not socketed, so you cannot change it. Of that 128mb, 16mb is used by the video graphics, so you really only have 112mb free for program storage and CE memory/applications.

The OS build that HP provides for this machine is very sparse, only including a few basic apps. You have your typical IE6, and a simple text editor. Other than that, there isn't much else for the average user. Of course there is a plethora of applications for using the device as it was meant to be used for, as a thin client, including Citrix, RDP, and many more.

We once had a link to x86 programs someone had compiled. I'm sure I can find it here and it would be worthwhile to have if you have one of these devices. I did install Softmaker's Textmaker and Planmaker on it, and they both ran just fine using the version that I copied from my AMD 50x15 image.

I thought that at 800mHz this thing would run circles around my old AMD PIC...but it really doesn't. It is faster, but not remarkably so.

In the pictures below you can see in order 1) The HP T5520, 2) The desktop and start buttonk 3) Control panel options, 4) Memory options.

Oh, by the way, while it is old technology, the price was right on eBay auction 162002507412, only $12 delivered.

One last thing, I have a couple other thin clients from HP I've been playing with. HP has the CE5 image file free for download. I flashed this one to get a clean image...which worked well. But when I tried to flash other HP thin clients, it wouldn't work. During the flash process you get an error statement saying something like "you cannot flash this device with the image as the license doesn't apply to this hardware" or something along those lines. In other words, I could only flash the image to match the hardware as HP originally sold it, so I can't put the HP CE6 image on this CE5 machine, even though it could handle it.











Attachments
----------------
tcdevice.jpg (334KB - 0 downloads)
tcdesktop.jpg (213KB - 0 downloads)
tccontrolpanel1.jpg (152KB - 0 downloads)
tcmemory.jpg (219KB - 0 downloads)

Whoa, check out the abbreviated Start Menu.

Only 128 MB of RAM? Web browsing must be a pain. (However, if there's a Java client for x86, couldn't you try the Java version of Opera Mini? )