ok a question

I am sick of lugging a pretty hefty CAD laptop around even though its a high spec one its still not quite up to what the tower does

if I have a proper cad workstation at work for example can i use it on my less powerful laptop like a slim book thingy with no graphics card etc (we have one of those big graphics cards in a server/CAD box) and access it remotely

or am I understanding virtualisation wrong

Sounds like what you want is a remote desktop, not a virtual machine.

That’ll involve installing software on the server (tower) and the client (laptop).

VNC is the only one I’ve used and not for years. Others probably know of more modern solutions.

It depends!  Theoretically you’ve got the right idea behind thin client computing.  A light weight (both computationally and often physically) PC connects to a heavy weight back end server that may have multiple processors, GPUs etc.

I’ve never heard of anyone using Thinclient for serious CAD work (I may just be out of touch though).  I think it may depend on the type of cad work you do (and even the software you use) how viable it is.    If you do loads of on screen visualisation stuff then sending that amount of image data over a network sounds like it could be a bottle neck to me.  If your on screen work is relatively light but you do huge FEM calculations or build sophisticated raytrace renderings then having the server do the heavy lifting is logical.

The other issue would be be Thinclient relies on a robust network.  That is great within a big office building, and for light weight stuff (like word processing) probably OK from a remote office/working from home, but if you are on a patchy WiFi connection somewhere you’ll probably be unable to do anything.  The bottleneck can be at your end but also how data gets in/out at your “work” end – if you are a small business on ADSL connections that could be limiting.

I “Remote Desktop” from a low spec tablet to high spec desktop all the time, but I’m not doing intensive graphics work, just software development work (back end so not much graphical). In the case of Windows and Remote Desktop (built into Windows), and assuming the applications work on drawing instructions to repaint the display instead of plain bitmap rendering, then it’s actually quite efficient over RDP. Bitmap rendering shoves the traffic up big time (that includes double buffered apps as I discovered recently, but decent ones should drop the double buffering when over a remote connection).

The problem I have is with lag where the mouse clicks in particular have a slight delay.

Animation, bitmap rendering, videos, then you’re getting slow.

There was an attempt to do this kind of thing for gaming with servers playing the games and remote sessions rendering the graphics locally. I forget the name of the project now, but think it got scrapped.

CAD stuff might work better with Remote Desktop if it’s mainly line drawing render. Once into 3D work, bitmaps and textures then it may not be so great.

Ideally you want a thin client type of solution but depends on an application that can do that. I’d guess in the Apple world you might have it. They’re promoting all kinds of fluffy upcoming graphic stuff for iPads which look to me like back ends that are doing the grunt work in the cloud and iPad apps as the client.

You need to look at whether your CAD software has an option to run over the internet. I know Solidworks were talking about this a while ago but not sure if it’s been implemented. Have a look at On Shape, this runs in a web browser and seems to work fairly well, and you only need a fairly basic laptop.

All depends what you need to do. For FEA and CFD SimScale does much the same, cloud based servers with your front end running in a browser.

Done graphic dependant stuff remote from a good PC and over the cloud on AWS and MS served stuff, for me it was the little lag as you were drawing or clicking somewhere that meant more missed hits than are acceptable. Was fine for tending to stuff or emergency access but not something I’d like to do a lot.

Though my new work laptop is a Dell XPS and it handles the 3-d stuff very well, would something like that do CAD happily? Not a cheap option

https://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/windows/

Next question? (-:

Oh yeah, and we’re geeks, not nerds.

Does Teamviewer manage to keep up there Cougar?

Team Viewer is very painful over a slow internet connection – but then most remote desktop apps are…

I use GIS software on a VDI, it’s generally OK but 3D is limited, I’m assuming the rate the desktop image is sent to my citrix desktop is too low, it’s just jerky.

Oh yeah, and we’re geeks, not nerds

Sure about that, Cougar?

Rachel