Hinchingbrooke School is a co-educational 11-18 LEA comprehensive school with over 1800 students. We have a 150 station Cat 5 network servicing the whole site with a mixture of Acorn and NT fileservers. Although mainly an Acorn school we have increasing numbers of PC's and have had Apple computers since 1986. Our philosophy is very much to identify our curriculum needs whenever possible and find software and hardware to meet those needs. We therefore have a 'cross platform' approach to hardware.

Into this atmosphere we introduced 16 Thin Clients (Acorn Sprinters), a Terminal Server and an NT server in September 1998 as part of a trial by Microlynx. The Sprinters initially replaced 16 Acorn A3000's in one of our computer rooms and were running alongside 2 remaining A3000's and an A310 in the room. Printing was handled by an Acorn Printer Spooler and files were saved over the network to Acorn Level 4 Fileservers.

The first goal was simply to substitute the Sprinters for the A3000's so that students could not tell the difference and would have all the normal user interfaces for network file handling, printing and application loading. The fact that this was accomplished in just one and half days by Microlynx raised looks of disbelief from those in the school more used to setting up networks of desktop computers. Achieving so much in such a short space of time is a tribute to the hard work of the engineers and the Topcat product which handles the booting of the Sprinters from the NT server, from which they also obtain all the Acorn application software.

Students immediately noticed the improved performance and much smaller size (they now have room to open their books!) and my technicians noticed the benefit over the next couple of months when absolutely nothing went wrong - and this is where we will continue to reap a benefit for many years to come - virtually zero maintenance! Having all the software on the server is nothing new but these Sprinters have no floppy disc drive, no fan, no hard disc - in fact no moving parts whatsoever and consequently less to go wrong (another interesting spin off is a quite room!).

The next stage was to configure our existing Acorn computers, ranging from A310 to RiscPC's, to boot from the NT server under Topcat and this has been running successfully since September 1999. The Topcat boot structure gives one point of reference for all system management of Acorn computers and their applications and enables old Acorn hardware to provide internet and email facilities.

The Sprinters are now in the Sixth Form Centre meeting an increasing need to run Microsoft applications using Terminal Server with Citrix's Metaframe product. In this mode the application runs entirely on the server with only changes to screen displays, mouse and keyboard clicks being transmitted across the network. On these devices students can choose to work in the Acorn or PC environment, swapping between them at will and accessing both Acorn and NT fileservers.

For us, this is what it is really all about - enabling students and staff to have access to the best selection of IT tools that enable them to work effectively and with imagination and which at the same time is maintainable by hard pressed teachers and technicians.