As I stated in my last posting we have purchased three Netbook computers to be used for evaluation of capacity and also to use at professional meetings and in the field with GIS. One of the areas that we have done a fair amount of work recently has been in the area of 'Cloud Computing'. We have used applications both on an on campus Terminal Server and also in the public cloud. Cloud computing is the use of application resources that are not resident on your own computer. For those of old enough this is how we got started in computing that the application ran on the main frame computer and we used a 'dumb' terminal (I actually used punch cards also). I recently tested an Acer Aspire One Netbook using our terminal server. I ran three different applications from the server, ESRI ArcInfo, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer. I was very impressed at the speed the applications performed on the Netbook computer; performance was similar to my quad core desktop computer. The Netbook computer was connected wirelessly to the college network and my desktop computer is connected by an Ethernet Cable.
On the very large graphic operation of creating a map, I used resources on my data server as well as my ArcGIS Server and the operations ran very smoothly once they opened, which took a few seconds. I did some querying and zooming of the data sets and they ran very quickly. When I ran the two word processors, they both operated just as if they were on my desktop. While I might not want to sit and work on a 10 or 11 inch screen for an extended period of time, I found they worked very nicely with the terminal server.
We are going to test the Netbook Computer in the next few days with a larger monitor and external wireless keyboard and see how they function as a desktop computer. We are interested in seeing if a Netbook along with an application server (terminal server) can replace the desktop for many faculty. Another test will be utilizing a USB GPS and mapping software to determine the response time and view ability of the maps in a car.
