Time does fly by when you’re busy. I’ve had an HP T310 PCoIP zero client on my desk for a couple of months and I’ve been using it but hadn’t written about it. The unit was kindly supplied by HP after I wrote about the T410 on this blog and about thin and zero clients in general on TechTarget. I had been trying to get hold of one for a while as I like this type of zero client.
The T310 is a PCoIP hardware zero client, it uses an ASIC designed by Teradici to handle the remote display protocol rather than having a general purpose CPU and local operating system like a thin client. The T310 uses the latest Tera2 chip which provides about three times the graphics performance of the original Tera as well as having better USB support. The limitation with Zero clients is generally that they are only good with one remote display protocol, in this case PCoIP, which means VMware View. In my use the Tera isn’t the limiting factor so much as the network speed back to my co-lo lab, so I couldn’t stretch the Tera2 for display performance. I did use my normal dual monitor setup with two different screens, PCoIP fully supports this and passes the screen information into the VDI desktop. Below you can see my Windows 7 desktop working in correct multi monitor.
I also plugged a USB printer into the T310, the Brother label printer you see beside the T310 above, to give it a bit more interest. The printer worked flawlessly, the only issue I had was Windows 7 making it the default so the page setup in applications was rather small. Easily corrected by changing the default back. Naturally the wireless USB keyboard and mouse worked just fine.
Overall I am pretty impressed with the T310, enough to do quite a bit of my weekend work using the terminal, including spending a couple of hours doing my sales tax returns and the other running the business things that I need to do. I;m not quite ready to come home for the weekend without my laptop by it wouldn’t be a disaster if I did leave it at the apartment.
Still on my to-do list is the VPN based link back to he co-lo over the WiMAX connection provided by my ISP so I can test the central management of the terminals.
© 2013, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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