Wow, I just noticed how poor my grammar was there.
Sometimes it sucks you can't go back and edit your posts.

Genuine question:
Have you considered ipads, what pro's and cons have you come up with?
To me the positives are as follows:
* Portable
* Great battery life
* Supports a number of software (skype, facetime, etc)
* can be locked down if required.
* Apple care support is pretty low cost and the guys seem pretty helpful from my interactions with them.

The biggest negative I can see is the requirement for wireless coverage, or failing that, cost of a cellular/mobile link. However I see this as a limiting factor for any technology selected. If you have cat5 wired in the building you could conceivably just plug in an airport adapter nearby and plug that into the ethernet port if you want to reduce costs for things like wireless coverage. When the call is done, just unplug the adapter and take it with you.

I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts on this topic.

Oh geez, not this again.
Some people may have this attitude, but the majority of us that suggested this as a solution actually think it is a good idea from a simplicity and useability aspect. Set the thing up with facetime and skype as the only non restricted apps, bundle it in a protective case, get apple care support on the device and set up a sufficiently broad wireless coverage within the centre.and you will go a long way to providing what the requestor is asking for.

Other solutions are either
1) harder to support
2) more prone to breaking
3) just a pain in the ass in general

I wrote down a whole spiel why this is a good idea but accidentally nuked it when i decided to log in and not post as an AC.

Abbreviated version:
I'm not an apple fanboy, but this is definitely the best solution. Keep the device locked down to only run facetime and skype, keep the carers in control of scheduling when people call and charging the ipad when it's not needed (it has a fantastic battery life anyway so overnight charging ought to suffice unless there's a busy day). Keep an applecare contract open for the device and keep the internet connection with a provider that does high levels of support (or centralised administrative group or outsourcer ) and there's 95% of the support you'll ever need. I considered the idea of a long life android tablet with a child proof launcher, but the potential for the one way charging connector was a bit of a deterrent from me suggesting that as a solution.

The roll your own box and administer it remotely/as a client is a fair idea, but requires someone, somewhere to administer the device and incurs a substantial additional cost as although it may use standards, it is a custom created monstrosity that could be a liability if things break in the future. The smart tv thing is an interesting solution, but seems like it could be a lot harder to get the device to the less mobile patients than a simple to carry device like a tablet.

the KISS principle applies here more than anywhere else it possibly could.

I enjoyed it. Though so did my dad. I ended up getting kicked off my own pc by him when he decided he wanted to play.

  The only time he took no for an answer was when any time I was doing homework Any other time he didn't care what I was doing, he wanted to have a go.

And to those wondering, I may have only been fourteen at the time, but I saved up and _I_ bought the computer myself. That took a bloody long time.

Thanks for adding to the list of " stuff to look into".

Alas no new game content (including TNWO) for me until I get around to shuffling hard drives and putting in something bigger for my game data as I've only got 20Gig free on my Steam data drive.

From when i played it as a new release I always thought they were saying "My Mavis".
Dragged my copy out a couple of weeks ago and it still sounds like that to me.

I lost a lot of my early gear when I moved interstate 15 years ago, I had some gear that was almost as old as I am, but unfortunately I had to find another home for them. I regret a few of them going out of my reach.

As to laptops and other computers. I was thinking other tech that just keeps on ticking, clocks, etc but i can sort of play this game..
Some of the gear I have kept since my move are as follows:

* A Dell CPx Pentium 233 laptop that I keep in storage, it's handy to have something with a real serial port and it gets dragged out whenever I need a terminal.
* A Sony C1 series Picturebooks. I had wanted one of these for YEARS since i saw them new in the shop and I ended up getting one (a PCG-C1XS) for a fraction of the original price.
* The same can be said about the Toshiba Libretto, I liked those and picked up a Libretto 50 a couple of years ago. Again at a fraction of the original retail cost.

I have some slightly obscure hardware floating about that I've kept "just because". My oldest two are a Sparcstation 5 which is sitting in the garage in storage with the Dell Cpx and a Sparcstation 20 that still works, but as it's old and rather noisy it has been retired from service and now serves as a stand to keep my desptop pc & NAS from sitting directly on the carpet next to my desk. I used to have a Sparcstation2, but I gave it away when I decided to cut down on the crap a bit.
Some not-as-old but equally obscure gear is my IBM PC 365, my Dec Alphastation 500/500 as well as a Sun Ultra 5...

My wife was given a PJammer alarm clock in the mid 80's and it's still going strong today. It was in storage for a couple of years but we dug it out five years ago and it's been beside our bed ever since.

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg....

Yeah I know I'm flogging this horse, but I hope this helps. I got laughed at a bit for considering it, many jeers of "why bother? just get a ssd" but I'm happy, very happy.

If you've a spare 3.5 slot then consider investing in a Silverstone hddboost plus the largest ssd you can afford. Then make sure you keep the drive optimised with all system files to the start of the drive.

I can confirm that they seem to work reasonably well.

Further to this, the highpoint controller can either be configured to act as a caching only drive, which leaves your initial drive intact and only clones it. Or you can specify that it actively contains the ONLY copy of the indexed data. I believe this is called performance mode. I've not tested the latter as although I like the speed boost SSD's can give, I just don't trust them enough, given their usual/immediate mode of failure, whereas barring a catastrophic head crash you usually get a chance to notice a platter drive's problem and recover your data.

See my above post. The highpoint controller initially just indexes everything it can in the order it finds it on the drive (I wasn't able to determine if it was alphabetical or in order it was on the disk from start to end) and through a utility you can get the controller to only index specific directories and individual files that you deem worthy of caching.I definitely noticed a performance boost, not as good as it could be, but a lot better than it was with the drive by itself.

The hddboost unit on the other hand is pure mirroring of the platter drive until it hits the end of the SSD. Boot times are improved, as are general file accesses, but nowhere near as efficiently as if it was a pure SSD. I've not done a drive mirror comparison to see if that is an improvement again or not.

So they both do a similar job, just a little bit differently. I've happily kept both in my computer for over a year and I see no need to change this anytime in the near future.