Stretch your network: thin clients are a smart, inexpensive way to provide schools with more computers.

Thin clients may be the perfect solution for many schools' evergrowing computing needs. Small, inexpensive alternatives to their more temperamental and costly cousins--full-fledged computers--thin clients offer schools and libraries more bang, or workstations, for their bucks. In a thin-client network, each student has access to a monitor and keyboard, which are connected to the school's local area network through a small box, the size of a textbook, called a thin client (or as it's more formally known, a "thin-client appliance").

Why are thin clients so cheap? For starters, they use a less expensive processing chip than the family of Pentium chips currently favored by more sophisticated computers that run complicated soft,are. Thin clients also have no hard, floppy, or CD-ROM drives. All of their computer processing--retrieving files, running software applications, accessing the Internet--is managed by a clever, state-of-the-art server located in another part of the school. Since thin-client boxes are so simple, they require little maintenance, …