How Do I Reduce The Amount Of Computer Towers In My Home?
You can’t have the setup you describe, with only one actual computer and multiple input/output terminals, at least not with Windows and commodity hardware. With that in mind, to get something approximating this, you have a few possibilities. As the other posters have mentioned, it’s possible to have a central computer host your files, applications, and so forth–this is generally knows as “thin client” computing. Unfortunately, in order to access that central machine, the terminals need to be able to connect to it, and that means you do need a full fledged computer of some kind, running a full fledged operating system. However, they do not need to be full-size full-spec desktop PCs, although since you’re using Windows, you unfortunately need somewhat beefier hardware than if you were using some X11/Unix based system. As long as they can run WinXP comfortably, they’ll work, so you could easily plop down some older Pentium III machines with, say, 256/384 MB of RAM (more if you don’t turn
I recently came across Hubster for Linux. Unfortunately, it requires some proprietary hardware. Here is a twisted idea for using it with windows. Set up a multi headed linux box with Hubster. Also set up a multi user windows box using terminal server (or a hack thereof). Use the multi-headed linux box to access the windows terminal server using linux Remote Desktop clients. For added fun, you could probably do this all on a single computer if you used something like VMware to host the windows system inside a virtual machine on the linux box.
