Having worked in an analytical chemical testing laboratory before, this story really caught my eye. I remember the lab being chock full of aged desktop PCs with barely usable 15" CRTs and gargantuan cases collecting dust. The sole purpose of these machines was to pull data off the fabulously expensive testing equipment sitting besides them. Picture a 1996 desktop from gateway, yellowing with age, that you couldn't unload on your grandmother because it's so big, slow and ugly and beside it is a beautiful, new, top of the line, $50,000 mass spectrometer.

This lab just recently replaced 40 desktop PCs with UMPCs to not only save a ton of space and make the place look like it came out of a science fiction movie, but also to reduce power consumption and lower cooling costs. The pictures provided by Ctitanic are an incredible illustration of the impact that UMPCs had on this laboratory. The specific units used appear to be AMtek T700 units with VIA C7-M processors running at 1.0 GHz. I would love to hear what the lab technicians have to say about this big change in their workplace.

Visitor

Thursday, 27 September 2007

This is excellent stuff! Interestingly the machines sitting next to the UMPCs are Toshiba thermal barcode printers.

I work for a software company in the Auto-ID/logistics world and it is my opinion that UMPCs will eventually be huge for this industry. This is to a large part due to the printers you see in the photo, as they are best used with a full Windows printer driver. Many current mobile devices that run Windows Mobile (etc) have limited printing options and are therefore painful to implement for printing. UMPCs solve this in one stroke as they are a full PC!

You should note, that there are many other industries that have the same printing problem.