From: Neil Zanella (nzanella@cs.mun.ca)
Date: Wed May 23 2001 - 02:16:11 CEST
On Tue, 22 May 2001 Richard.Kirkcaldy@IC24.net wrote:
> Hi,
> Excuse my ignorance here, but if you are running the PC with the
> root file system on the floppy and also running a vnc server then won't
> most of the processing get done on the laptop anyway?
I guess it depends. Using a VNC server there will certainly be video
processing done by the video card on my notebook but all the computations
will be done on the PC. As an example I could be running a command line
compiler on the PC from my VNC's xterm window. Then the PC will do all
the work. It is only when I run the application that the output will be
displayed on the notebook's screen but the essence of all those nested
for loops containing ints and floats will actually execute on the PC.
Of course if the screen is updated frequently then there will be high
network traffic and my video RAM will have to handle that but this should
not be any worse than using an X Terminal for those who have seen or
touched them. The laptop will do no more processing than an NCD does.
> Here's my suggestion, which may be worse or better I don't know-
> somebody please tell me:-
>
> Swap the laptop hard disk for a PC hard disk.
No thanks. I like to carry my laptop around sometimes without being bound
to work in my office.
An experienced Unix programmer once said: "there is no difference between
a hard drive and an ethernet card." He was referring to a buch of diskless
computers booting off the network in our lab and getting their entire OS
that way. My approach is the same here except that I also realize that
a second computer does not need a monitor of its own either.
A server need not serve everything: the laptop can serve the hard drive
and the PC can serve its CPU. This is somewhat unconventional but the
whole point is that I want the laptop to be able to stand on its own
at the expense of processing speed.
> Of course either way you have one and a half computers, and so I
> personally would sell the laptop to pay for the extra hard ware on the PC.
No way. My P166 laptop was a really good buy: it's got 512kb cache on die
which is more than ordinary PIII's have. It also has a nice TFT screen.
If I were to buy the screen alone in TFT for the PC I would pay as much
as for the laptop itself! This laptop can make a nice X Terminal, and much
more.
> You don't need to spend big bucks on it, second hand video cards mice and
> keyboards are always advertised in our local papers. And whilst a new
> graphics card and a big hard disk may be expensive I am quite happily
> running an old two gig disk which is only half full even after installing
> loads of goodies, and granted the graphics look bad with my one meg card -
> but I'd need to upgrade the monitor as well and I'm not too bothered.
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