From The Workshop: Thin Clients for All!

I've always wanted to have a computer in the workshop, something that would let me pull up dimensioned drawings and assemblies without having to run upstairs and print them out. For a while, I made due with a cheap first-gen HP stream, but it lacked the power to run sketchup so I ended up screenshoting the dimensioned parts anyway. I quickly went back to printouts and have been using them ever since. With the new basement workshop coming together, I decided it was time to upgrade my computing system.
I thought about using my spare computer hardware, but none of it is passively cooled which poses an issue with dust ingress and build up, even if it lives inside a cabinet. There were plenty of cheap laptops I could have gotten on sale that would hve worked well enough, but they all had the same issue of dust clogging up the heatsinks and fans. I also had a monitor arm and a spare 24" monitor I wanted to use and it made no sense to pay for an integrated screen I wouldn't use anyway. My mind drifted to thin clients and I started looking at the $200 passively cooled windows boxes to run a remote desktop tunnel to my workstation in my office. The latest versions of windows 10 have an issue with network discovery and I haven't been able to make windows remote desktop work so I started looking into VNC programs and was tearing my hair out, trying to figure out how I was going to do this with minimal upfront cost and reliability.
Meanwhile, I was cleaning up my computer junk in my office and came across a little dark blue unopened box . Suddenly everything clicked. My spare Steam Link!

Years ago, when I first heard about the Steam link, i wasn't that impressed. It was supposed to be Valve's take on in-home game streaming, but instead of playing the game in your living room on servers in a datacenter, it would run off your own dedicated gaming computer and send the picture and controls to anywhere in the house that had an internet connection. I had my doubts that even a wired gigabit network had the bandwidth for reliable two-way game streaming. I was right. Early reports ran into issues with video quality and the ethernet port wasn't even gigabit, 100 mbps only. Regardless, I wasn't a couch gamer and I didn't have a use for it. What I did do at the couch was watch movies and TV shows. I had cable bundled with my internet, but refused to hook up the cable box since network TV is pretty much all garbage ("ancient aliens" on the "history" channel comes to mind...). I had a hard drive full of movies that I spent an entire summer ripping that I couldn't play on my TV though. I experimented with PLEX, but I found it unreliable and gave up on being able to watch my collection without hooking up my laptop up to the TV. Then the Steam link went on sale for $30 (50% off or so) and I wondered if it could work as a media streamer, after all, that's pretty much what it was doing anyway. A little digging told me no, but a review mentioned that you could go to your desktop to get around UAC prompts while using the link and that made me realize I could use the link as a full thin client through the steam desktop program!
I bought two (a missed opportunity in the past has driven my to buy duplicates of most tech hardware, most of which end up never being used...) and went to hook it up. As far as I knew, no one was using the link boxes for this purpose, so I wasn't entirely sure it would work well enough to use on a regular basis. I had just finished fully wiring my house for ethernet, so I knew bandwidth wasn't going to be the limiting factor, but there were too many other variables to be sure. And sure enough, at the time, it just didn't work very well. I could get to the desktop and watch videos through the steam link, but the video quality was horrendous. There was too much compression which led to crazy artifacts and color rendition that was borderline criminal. I used it for a while, but it was too much of a hassle to really be worth it. So it languished under my TV for a few years until we moved into this new house.
On a whim, I decided to try the link again, maybe some firmware updates had come out in the past few years. And boy, they sure did. I think the link was updating for at least an hour over a symmetrical gigabit fiber and by the time it was done, it was like I had a whole new machine. Somehow, they had managed to improve the stream compression to the point where it wasn't painful to watch a movie anymore. I could sit at the couch and browse through my computer almost as easily as if I was sitting in front of it.
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And so, when I found that spare link, I knew I had my thin client. No fans or heatsinks to get dusty, a built in wireless card that should be enough to maintain a reliable connection, HDMI for my spare monitor, and all the power of my workstation in a little black box about the size of a deck of cards. Perfect.
I hooked it up and for the most part, I'm very happy. It works well for my needs and I can even watch  movies or youtube while I'm taking a break. Having a full sized monitor is much nicer than trying to work on a 11" laptop screen, especially when trying to reference dimensions on a complex part.
Sometimes the wireless connection is a little spotty (I don't have ethernet run to that part of the basement) which drops the connection and forces me to power-cycle the link.