I have a home network with three computers that my wife, 3 kids use, and I all use. Our family likes the flexibility of using any of the three computers. The software my wife and I use are installed on all three PC’s, and the kids (ages 3,4, and 6) have a variety of educational CD-ROM’s they like to play. Two of the computers are pretty old, so the sound and video on the CD-ROM’s sometimes lags. In addition the 3 year old sometimes scratches the CD’s as he puts them in and out of the disc tray.
To better manage everything what I’d like to do is buy a fast, fourth computer and use it as a server, and have everything run on that. I’m familiar with Citrix, where basically software is installed on a central server and the Citrix software sends screen-scrapes to the “client” PC’s. My questions are:
[ol]
[li]Is there affordable software like Citrix that I can use in my home?[/li][li]Will it perform well enough so that the audio and video educational CD-ROM’s don’t skip or lag on the “client” PC’s?[/li][li]Can I centrally load the CD’s onto the server so that nobody has to swap them in and out of the CD-tray?[/li][/ol]
With the third question, I remember other threads that have described software where basically each CD gets assigned a drive letter - and I can live with having 20 or so addressable games at a time.
All the computers are running Windows XP and right now we’re using Microsoft Networking to connect them all using an Ethernet network and wireless network.
Not quite a Citrix, as it only works with one ‘screenscape’ at a time, but you could try RealVNC. Few frills, but it’s free, so won’t cost a penny to try.
There’s the Windows Terminal Server. If I remember correctly, it borrows some technology from Citrix itself. It is integrated into Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003 Server. To my knowledge, however, audio and video does not transmit well. Also, the Server product is quite expensive, and requires rather obscene (for a home setup) hardware.
A better option is probably VNC, which has already been mentioned in this thread. (To clarify: There is the original VNC, and also modified versions, RealVNC and UltraVNC being the fastest ones; and they are all free.) VNC is a remote screen capture program, and is a great tool for demoing apps or working with remote machines, and for this reason very popular with software developers. VNC is supposed to support audio, but I’ve never tried this.
You’ll likely have problems making video fast enough. In my experience UltraVNC – which has a clever optimization in that it installs a passive display driver that picks up graphics operations, as opposed to the other VNC implementations which actively search the entire screen for changes – cannot do real-time (25-30fps) video on a 100mbit network, and certainly not on a slower wireless connection. It depends on the video size/display resolution, so your mileage may vary.
I imagine a gigabit LAN might work well, though; gigabit network cards and hubs are pretty cheap these days.
To do what you want would require either Citrix or something very similar, I know of no freebies out there. Terminal services is fantastic but there are issues with video/audio even on a fast network. PC Anywhere would work in the same way. Fine for support/diagnostic stuff but not so great in multimedia. Come to think of it I don’t know how well Citrix would handle that, never tried.
VNC and PCAnywhere are great for remote access, but they only allow one connection to the remote machine. That is, the server has a logged-in session and VNC or PCAnywhere is allowing a remote terminal to act as if it were local. This is fundamentally different from systems like Citrix and Terminal Services where the server can run multiple simultaneous users remotely. I use both VNC and PCAnywhere quite a bit for remote admin, but they only allow one session on the server. If a second remote machine tries to connect to the server, they are either blocked or bump the first connection (depending on config). If there are multi-session versions of either of these apps, I’d be very interested to find them but I don’t think that’s the case.