• Recommend:
• 0 Comments

3Com Offers NetPC Alternative

Can%squott afford a NetPC? 3Com says its new card will offer many of the same functions for a lot less.

By Bill Snyder, PCWorld   

3Com, the Santa Clara, California-based networking company, claims it has the answer. Today it introduced a network card that it says has many of the management capabilities of a NetPC--at a fraction of the cost.

%dquotThe NetPC is great technology, but what about the installed base?%dquot asked David Flynn, marketing manager for 3Com. %dquotI don%squott think they can afford to wait.%dquot

The managed PC--it doesn%squott have an official name yet--will ship this fall. 3Com hasn%squott priced it yet, but according to Flynn, the built-in management capabilities will add perhaps 10 or 20 percent to the cost of a typical card. A full-fledged NetPC, by contrast, will cost about $1000.

When it ships, the card will allow system administrators to manage traditional PCs from a central location, and even do things as complex as installing a new operating system. Pre-boot instructions contributed by LanWorks, a 3Com partner in the endeavor, reside in a ROM chip plugged into the card.

And when PCs support the Wake-On-Lan feature (expected to be available in many systems later this year), power management tools from ON Technology will let managers turn computers on and off remotely. An administrator could turn off and reboot a PC that had a corrupted OS, for example, or could reinstall the OS without leaving a central control console.

Also partnering with 3Com is McAfee, which said the next version of ServiceDesk, its suite of management products, will support 3Coms NetPC. The new version will also be available in the fall.

The cards will probably run better under the next release of Windows, but in the meantime they support both Windows 95 and Windows NT.