Maxspeed MaxTerm 8300B
And we thought only IBM and Dell came out with ultra black IT equipment. Almost twice the dimensions of the Ipex and HP thin clients it is still considerably smaller than your average desktop PC--more like a Sony PS2 console.
There is a single PCI slot on the mainboard but no riser/convertor card to change the direction. Also there are two standard molex power connectors: one HDD/CD ROM type and one FDD type. So there is plenty of expansion room. The IDE port is connected to a Compact Flash memory card reader/writer that has a 64MB CF card in it to hold the operating system and other non-volatile data.
Once connected up and powered on the operator is confronted with a Linux desktop. We found the configuration menu very easy to follow and feature rich. In a matter of minutes we had manually configured the network although it also can detect and set itself via DHCP. This application is truly somewhere that Linux could finally find that leg into the corporate environment that it has been searching for. The fact that Linux is based on thin TCP/IP networking technology from the base up means that its communications and transactions with the servers can be very direct and fast with the minimum of overheads.
This system has plenty of room for expansion and also has the attraction of introducing users to running a Linux environment.
| Product | Maxspeed 3300B |
| Price | $907 |
| Vendor | Maxspeed |
| Phone | 02 6884 5922 |
| Web | www.maxspeed.com.au |
| Interoperability |  |
| Supports all the common standards. | |
| Futureproofing |  ½ |
| Runs Linux, plenty of ports and expansion room. | |
| ROI |  ½ |
| Good price for the features. | |
| Service |  |
| Three-year warranty with immediate replacement is good. | |
| Rating |  |
Winterm WT1200, or 1xxx series in general, has NOTHING to do with Linux, it runs Wyse Thin OS (WTOS - formally Blazer), which is proprietary OS developed by Wyse, and it fits 512 kB of flash memory in case of WT1200 (AFAIR WT1200 does not have NAND flash at all). Linux is used in WT5xxx series.