Thursday, February 04, 2010

HP t5745 Externals And Internals

Of course one is always tempted to take apart something that is working fine and see what makes it tick. I have been running the new HP t5745 thin client at my desk for about a week now and it's working really well. Performance still feels about 10% faster than the older model. The Intel Xorg drivers are stable and fast, and I haven't seen any blinking or video problems. Looks like this one is a winner.

The inside is very clean. Memory, Apacer flash module and CPU take up the most space.



The front is well designed; microphone, headphone and two USB ports easily available to the users.



The back is clean, and offers all the ports we need. PS2 ports are appreciated to keep the USB ports clear for other devices.



If you are considering a move to thin clients, this is the best model I have seen to date. With a 400 dollar price point, and anticipated 10 year duty cycle it's certainly attractive. Our 5725s are proving to be solid work horses with very few failures even after 3 years.

10 comments:

Matthew W. S. Bell said...

One could fit four more USB ports in the space taken up by the two PS/2 ports...

Dave Richards said...

@Matthew: Very true, my point was that it's nice to have everything plugged in and still have 6 USBs free. :)

Kevin DeKorte said...

I can't believe they are not putting digital display connectors (DVI or HDMI) on these things. LCD displays look so bad over VGA connections.

Dave Richards said...

kevin: It has a a display port on the back, which comes with a DVI adapter. It's right above the VGA port.

Dylan said...

Dave, how does power usage compare to a regular desktop? Can you remotely shutdown/hibernate these at night? Do you know of any ARM based thin clients that can run entirely on PoE?

Dave Richards said...

@dylan: Looks like they run at 19volts. I have a device around here that measures power usage and will test and report the results. I have code in my custom build to shut them off after 3 hours of inactivity. I haven't tested the the default OS to see how they handle that issue; but the HP default OS is pretty robust. I haven't seen any thin clients that run PoE.

Anonymous said...

Did you get the 2GB flash memory version? I think that is going to be essential in future. I just did a Debian testing core install + X server for a different thin client (an old shuttle box I converted to a thin client). The root partition (including log files, apt data etc., after a couple weeks of use) takes 944M, but that is too close for comfort to fit into a 1GB flash drive (and probably wouldn't fit in any case since you lose a noticeable fraction of that 1GB when formatting the drive).

Dave Richards said...

@anonymous: 2GB Apacer is on the way. I would never deploy a 1GB flash drive when you consider the duty cycle. My build right now is sitting at 700MB. I'm going to spend some time unloading packages that are not required for our final specifications. We are hearing the 2GB Apacer is around 50 bucks.

Bryan said...

Hi, Dave. I have two of these on the way. I am very curious as to whether you ever used your device to measure power consumption in watts. I'll keep an eye on this comment section in case you do. :-)

~Kind regards,

Bryan

Anonymous said...

Hello-
New to the Thin Clients and picked up one of these on eBay (t5745 with wireless). It had no instructions, which I can get from HP's site, but what I don't know how to do is reimage it to it's base OS...? HELP...!

Any guideance or direction for someone literally just starting out new with these would be great.
Thanks!