Does my small box exist?

[steverowe58]

Hi Looking for some free advice and this seems like a good place to get it.

So my wife and I have aging laptops that need replacing and I think that Skyrim is going to be a big enough trigger for me to do that.

Space is at a big premium and we like laptops as these can easily be cleared down from where they sit in their day to day lives. They also tend to be always on and since they are in the front room the level of noise generated by them is also a problem.

I also have a NAS and squeezebox but don't think that is relevant.

Anyway obviously just replacing the laptops is an easy option that I (probably) don't need any help with. What I'd like to know is if there is......

At work I often Remote Desktop or use Citrix into servers or different applications. In order to do this I need to have a proper PC running windows etc etc. What I'd like to know is there a way of simplyfing the hardware that is required at the client end.

For example I get a home server PC that is capable of running two virtual windows sessions both of which are running SKyrim in Ultra (!)
At the client end I have all the peripherials (i.e. monitor / mouse /kb) but no laptop. Instead of a laptop I have a "small box" that allows me to connect and control one of the virtual sessions running on my home server.

So two small boxes allows myself and wife to both play Skyrim (for example) off of the one piece of hardware.

So is there such a thing as the "small box"?

Cheers,

Steve

 

[Gorman]

Yes and no.

You are referring to a thin client i presume http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client

Yes you could set this up but your problem will be the server, games on the pc more often than not require dx and dx compatible GPU.

Virtual machines dont run on the bare metal hardware, they typically "float" on a virtual operating platform which handles the bare metal hardware. Although this has come on leaps and bounds you are never going to get brilliant gaming performance on a virtual OS using traditional setups like Xen etc without really really doing some homework.

There must be this sort of server / setup availiable for services such as onlive to exist but they are beyond my experience. Every VM i have run has had terrible gaming performance.

Perhaps onlive's little box is the solution here?

http://www.onlive.co.uk/