You are all missing the boat with your questions about hard drives. The whole idea of the thin client is NOT to store data on the machine. It is only a front end to access data on a backend server. This gives a company a centralized location of data for backup and management, etc. All the applications are managed on the server (so no upgrades, modifications or patches to the software is needed on the client PCs). If a user loses or breaks the thin client, no big deal since there is no critical data strored on it. Also viruses and spyware goes down to a minimum. Battery life should be improved since there are no spinning disks, etc... All the pros out weigh the cons any day. Of course this geared for a corporate market, since very few households have servers that will operate as a backend for applications, etc. But maybe one day this will all change and we will all be on this.
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You are all missing the boat with your questions about hard drives. The whole idea of the thin client is NOT to store data on the machine. It is only a front end to access data on a backend server. This gives a company a centralized location of data for backup and management, etc. All the applications are managed on the server (so no upgrades, modifications or patches to the software is needed on the client PCs). If a user loses or breaks the thin client, no big deal since there is no critical data strored on it. Also viruses and spyware goes down to a minimum. Battery life should be improved since there are no spinning disks, etc... All the pros out weigh the cons any day. Of course this geared for a corporate market, since very few households have servers that will operate as a backend for applications, etc. But maybe one day this will all change and we will all be on this.
--Eric