HP Thin Client Promo at Slickdeals.net

I just posted the HP thin client promo to Slickdeals.net. It will be interesting to see what people think of these types of machines.

The promo:

http://h71016.www7.hp.com/.../index.asp

Prices range from $597 to $1797, corresponding with savings for $199 to $590. The resulting machine prices are $150 to $450 each. These are NOT high performance machines, but about as low performance as you can go with full features. The benefit is low price, ease of configuration, and in my humble opinion, very low energy consumption.

The story:

I bought a refurbished HP thin client t5000 (discontinued) from techforless for $80 (last one) and when it arrived I was totally surprised - it was a decent machine - they have all the characteristics of a real machine, only slower and less power hungry. A VIA Eden 400mhz, 32mb flash, 128mb ram, no hd. Even came with a nice keyboard! Also has Unichrome VGA chip, and uses 16mb ram for video. I tried several configurations, but ended up installing Debian to the t5000 in the following manner:

http://www.docunext.com/.../debian-usb-hp-t5000/

In a nutshell: I installed the the /boot/ to the 32mb flash memory, and / to an external 2.5" sata drive. The machine uses around 12 watts of power (display not included obviously).

Anyway I checked what other devices I could buy and found that HP is having a promo through the end of April for thin clients, buy 3 get 1 free. I bought 4 of the t5135 for $597.
These have 64mb of ram, but still use the slow 400mhz via eden. You can get the via 800mhz, or the amd geode 1ghz with the same promo, but I wanted the cheapest option. They also have the t5125 which is similar to the t5000 I already have but only 32mb of flash ram.

What are these machines good for? Well since I installed debian, I'm going to use it as a server of some sorts, probably DNS, web, or Jabber. Not sure yet. I plan to install XUbuntu on the t5135's I get. I'll probably use one or two as extra workstations, and the other two as more servers.

Also, techforless also has Chip PC Extreme thin clients running Windows CE for $75. These are much more limited (no bios I could see) and pretty much only good for a KVMoverIP connection to IE6. That's it!

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?p=6154903

PC Connection also has some good deals on HP products: