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I'm doing a feasibility study on migrating 30 of our in-house researchers from desktop towers to thin-clients. The problem (among others) that I'm facing is that our researchers have grown used to dual-monitors. Can anyone suggest a good thin-client which would allow for dual-monitors? Other qualities that are of interest to me are fan-less, low-cost, and disk-less/flash memory. Companies with resellers located in Canada is a plus. Duty is a pain in the arse.

Also there's the question of OS. Our network is composed primarily of Windows (2003, 2000, XP) and the users would be using RDP to connect to a terminal server. Should I go with an embedded version of Windows? Stripped down XP? I'm not opposed to Linux and would willingly go that route if there was a good locked down flavor with RDP support which could be easily integrated into a AD environment.

Thanks in advance for your answers! I'll post further information here if I've forgotten some details.

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We have used the HP t5145 thin client before, which supports dual monitors and worked very well. This uses HP's thin connect OS to connect to your terminal server.

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I was just about to recommend their t5540/t5455 models too, the first is a Win CE 6.0 box and the second is a ThinOS one. – Chopper3 Oct 1 '09 at 11:56
With this model, are you forced to use a VGA and DVI connector in order to use both monitors? Are there any dual-DVI thin client options? – ewwhite Jan 13 '11 at 18:50
I believe both models use one d-sub and one dvi-d. I'm happy to report that I went with the t5545 model and couldn't be happier. Also gets me away from some MS licenses (uses HP's thin client linux OS). – JohnyD Aug 2 '11 at 12:51
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ChipPC Extreme PCs have dual and quad screen supporting models. After running an environment with lots of Wyse and HP and even testing some Igel clients - ChipPC is by far my favourite thin client platform, for what it's worth.

They're easily integrated with Active Directory using their management platform - never got around trying their Linux versions though.

The Windows CE versions boot extraordinarily fast compared to other brands imo, which is just fun to watch but not really a killer feature in any way as thin clients aren't really rebooted that often - but it was one of those little things, the attention to detail, including how easy they're to rebrand (both the software and the hardware boxes themselves), that swayed me.

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I checked into these, but the supported resolution was way too low for my environment. – ewwhite Jan 18 '11 at 21:53
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Wyse V90 - XPe, Dual Monitor, Max ram 1GB - great little box (also a linux version V50)

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We's been using Wyse R50L thin clients because they support dual monitors. Ours connect to a Windows Server 08 R2 box via RDP. I don't think dual screens are possible on Server 03's version of RDP.

These are fan-less, and have 1028MB flash memory.

http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/R50L/index.asp

Sorry to rehash an old topic, but I wanted to add my experience for anyone else looking into this.

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