Last year at work, we decided we needed new computers. The ones we had were old, probably seven or eight years old at a guess, running Windows 2000 on 10 GB hard drives, 128 MB RAM and chunky 15" CRT monitors. As standalone machines with this setup and no internet, they worked fine. But people want and need to use the internet nowadays and once I'd installed firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware they soon crawled to a halt. Maybe I went overboard with the free software, but they were basically unusable.
We found a volunteer to help us network them all and invested in Windows 2003 Server through Charity Technology Exchange to do it. Everyone had there own login and file space. What I hadn't realised until this point was that most people using the computers found it difficult to remember their username and password from one week to the next. They just wanted to get online and browse, but by the time they had logged in with a new password set up by me as the system administrator they had lost the will to continue. And even if they did carry on, their experience was still poor due to general slowness and regular crashing of the machine or network connection.
I tried loading Ubuntu on to these machines, or rather Xubuntu, which worked OK. At least everything was a bit quicker and we didn't have to worry too much about firewalls, etc. I set them up so that by default they booted up into a "guest" login automatically so that people didn't have to remeber passwords. But even with Xubuntu, the experience wasn't great. The screens were still small and took up too much desk space. Some people wanted or preferred Windows XP or Vista or a Mac, I prefer Ubuntu. Ideally we would have a flexible system where people could learn and use different OSs on big screens, but with simple, quick and secure access to a kiosk-style screen for those who just wanted to browse the web.
So the Asus Eee Box seemed to fit the bill: it boots up into ExpressGate Splashtop - a no login kiosk for browsing the internet, playing games and messaging - in five seconds. I've set the BIOS up so that they don't auto-boot into XP after a few seconds if the user does nothing. For those that want to login to their own private space to do more advanced work they click on the green OS button to go to the XP / Ubuntu dual boot I set up like this:
The first NTFS partition is for XP, the second and third for ExpressGate and the Recovery Partition (not sure which is which, but for this purpose it doesn't matter). I used the Ubuntu Live CD Partition Editor to reduce the original XP partition to about 40 GB and create 15 GB root (sda6), 90 GB home (sda7) and 2 GB swap (sda8) ext3 partitions for Ubuntu. I left the MBR as it was and in a few minutes I had a triple boot Splashtop that anyone can use with options to boot into Ubuntu and Windows XP for advanced users.
Personally, I'm very impressed and happy with the Eee Box's performance with 1 GB RAM and 160 GB hard drive. No, it's not for power users as plenty of other reviews will testify, but for our needs at work it seems to work very well and I'd definitely recommend them for similar use elsewhere. They're a reasonable price I would say - we got ours from Novatech (who I can also recommend) for about £200.00 each and fixed them up separately with 22" flat screens. They're also very quiet, almost silent, in fact, and supposedly much more energy efficient than your standard PC.