This still puzzles me.



That explains the desktop loading to the state you left it, and you could achieve much the same effect rather more efficiently under Windows by choosing "Hibernate" instead of "Shut Down". Recovering from hibernation does not thrash the disk, because all the data is stored in one contiguous file.

What I don't understand is the "mobile" feature described by forquare1. Unless your applications are running on something like an X server, I can't see how a second desktop could know about work you were doing on the machine you were previously using and have now turned off. X server would be analogous to Terminal server.

If you have roaming profiles, you log off and shut down one machine and log on to another machine, it pulls your settings, including the list of applications you last had open. It then attempts to open those apps for you when you log on - if they are installed on the machine, and if your documents are available on the network...

The other way would be to use Forquare1's beloved Sunrays, with the sessions running on the central server and logging on to any console around the site. Again, this is down to the capabilities of the shell to remember what was running and restore the session.

Standby/hibernating is something else, but achieves something similar, but uses more power and you are limited to one machine.

I used to like the facility on KDE, it was very handy, but given the amount of thrashing involved and how much longer it takes to log on, I prefer to manually restart my sessions these days, loading the apps I need, as I need them.

Precisely! Thin clients on the desk, and stuff running on a server some other place. You can use Windows in this way, last I heard most of the Sun Ray solutions Sun sold were delivering Windows instead of Solaris/Linux.
In essence, I've got my words mixed up again, not to say Windows isn't mobile, just the default solution of a thick client (?) isn't mobile. Just seeing as this was default solution, I'd have thought there would have been something a bit fancy going on to make it happen.

I'm going to see how it goes today, but in all honesty, so far the standalone machine on my desk has been less responsive and slower in general, than my three Sun Rays and a dozen other people on the same server as me. In the office environment I'm in where predominant applications are Word, Excel and Outlook, I fail to see why there is a need to have a whole system on my desk, I can't install anything on it, I can't put disks or USB storage in it, and this is true of all computers on this new system we are migrating too...

That's what my company does. Everybody has a thin client on their desk, it has 1gb SSD and (i think dual core) sempron cpu. We run Citrix thin client and everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) is running in our data centre in USA. There was a problem with latencies first but it got sorted after couple of months. Only problem now is that they put 22 people on one Blade server and I don't have enough ram allocated, so it is pretty slow. Things like switching between windows, opening new program etc. But I love the cpu power available. Some spreadsheet calculations took minutes before, now it never takes longer than 10s...