SUMMARY: SunPCi II Cards

All-

  The results were mostly positive. I got about 15-20 responses (I am
always so impressed that you folks are eager to help, thanks!). Of
those, it appears that many people are using the 733MHz cards and are
happy with them. They are running Windows 98/98SE for the most part, and
are used so that Unix folk can run Office-type applications (ie not
playing games, not CAD work, nothing CPU/Graphic intensive). Some are
running NT, few are running 2000. No one said anything about XP :)

  Some suggested using Citrix & Windows Terminal servers, which is also
a good solution, though perhaps a little more pricey (it all depends on
how you do the accounting..). We are currently using the Citrix
solution, but users (that is software engineers) are generally unhappy
with it because it 1) times you out after 30 minutes (a policy
decision), and 2) it does not accurately preserve your environment like
a real PC(tm). Performance is somewhere in the top 5 complaints. We have
several (about 6) citrix servers, and the environment is dependent upon
which server you get. 

  I got only a few suggesting that s/w development really should be done
on a real PC, and that PC's are pretty awful cheap these days, which is
true.

  The chief complaint was that the card is slower than a similarly
equipped PC, and graphics are especially slow when in X-windows mode. No
one mentioned anything about network performance issues like we were
seeing w/ Windows 2k. We suspect it is a Windows 2k problem and not a
card problem. 

  As I mentioned, we are evaluating and I think we're taking
benchmarks.. I'll publish the results we get (comparing NT to 2k).. So
far, the attraction for us is cost and maintenance ease (merely copy a
file to reinstall the O/S -- could be beneficial for those tinkery s/w
developers who play in the registry more than they should :) )

  Thanks again to all who responded!

-Eric