7 days left! I've had an email arrive in my work inbox notifying me that my user account will be moved over to the thin client system next Friday. This means that I will finally have MS Office 2007, Communication Server and other useful tools at my disposal. I will also finally have access to my work email / storage from anywhere in the world. But perhaps most importantly, it should see a speed increase in my computing experience at work.

You may be wondering why, well all will be explained

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As some of you may remember, I wrote about thin client computing a couple of months ago. I talked about the pros and cons of such a system and how it's definitely a worthwhile move for businesses, but is still a long way off being viable for the home user.

When this move happens on Friday (13th) I'm anticipating a number of improvements to my working experience. As it stands, my knackered old work computer is showing a few "wrinkles" and constantly slows down, usually in the middle of me doing something important in excel.

Part of the problem is that the computer I inherited was formerly a hot desk computer. What this means is that it wasn't predominantly used by one person, but instead by anyone that happened to be passing within a few feet of it. Under the current structure of corporate networks, this poses a massive problem for the machine. Users' profiles and data are all stored centrally, yet the operating system, applications and all processing is done locally. When a person logs in to the computer, it contacts the server for authentication, downloads the profile (in its last known state) to the local hard drive and loads up the desktop. This profile is constantly updated on the server as work is done, and at the end of the session when you log out, all changes a stored on the server ready for next time.

When the workstation has one primary user, this doesn't pose much of a problem, as there only tends to be on main "footprint" (ie lasting impression of the previous user) left in the Windows installation. However when a computer is a hot desk, it sees multiple people logging in to it, and therefore multiple foot prints accumulate within the system folders, which poses a big problem - a lot of build up gets in the way of smooth system operation.

These computers are invariably never reformatted, in fact recently I was using a desktop that had been installed in 2004, and had such foot prints dating right back to installation date. Suffice it to say the system was incredibly slow, to the point that I had to raise a job to get the system reformatted (which did see a reasonable improvement in performance). It didn't however fix all problems, as the image used was less than optimal in the first instance, so things were just an improvement on before, and not an amazing fix.

With the thin client system, these foot prints do not get left around as the system is effectively a dumb box. All it has to do is display what is sent to it, and absorb the inputs from the user. As all processing is done centrally, this should mean the whole experience remains cleaner. That's the theory at least, and we are talking about corporate IT, so the reality may differ somewhat from the theory! At least the intention is there, and once this migration has happened, I should be able to report back on my experiences both in the office, and logging in from home.

Either way, this is a very positive step forwards, both from a user point of view and more importantly to any business, a security point of view. Watch this space...