ThinkGrid Hosted Virtual Desktop review

ThinkGrid's Hosted Virtual Desktop service offers access to Windows 7 virtual machines running in the cloud, enabling businesses to get the benefits of Microsoft's latest platform without having to upgrade to new computers.

The advantages of the service are that customers can access their Windows 7 desktop from anywhere with an internet connection, and from a variety of endpoint devices, and pay for it on a monthly basis.

However, we found that users with Windows XP - who are likely to make up a large part of the target market for such a service - will not enjoy the full Aero user interface experience, and may also have to upgrade their system before they can even access their remote desktop at all.

ThinkGrid's service is accessed via a web portal, which displays the services customers have subscribed to once they log in. (ThinkGrid offers other services such as applications on a pay-as-you-go basis.)

But to access a virtual desktop, users also need a piece of client software on their endpoint system: the vWorkspace Connector, from Quest Software. This can be downloaded from ThinkGrid's portal, but when we tested it with one of our office PCs running XP, we were unable to connect to the remote session.

After contacting ThinkGrid for help, it turned out that the latest 7.2 version of the vWorkspace client only supports Windows XP Service Pack 3 or later, while our test PC was still running Service Pack 2.

We upgraded it to Service Pack 3, but this turned out to be a lengthy and protracted process that took over an hour. Any small businesses in the same situation may be best advised to simply swallow the cost of investing in new PCs with Windows 7 ready installed.

For XP users whose systems are fully patched and up to date, accessing a ThinkGrid virtual PC should be no more difficult than installing the vWorkspace Connector and logging in via the portal.

Once we had installed SP3 and were able to access our hosted desktop, we were impressed with the user experience offered by the service.

Sadly, you don't get the flashy Aero or Aero Glass graphics if you are using Windows XP, just the Windows Classic theme. But in most other respects, we found that using the remote Windows 7 desktop was indistinguishable from using a physical Windows 7 PC.

Our trial hosted desktop was ready configured with Office 2010, and we were able to open applications such as Word and use them just as you do on a standard PC.

By default, the vWorkspace Connector automatically maps any drives on the endpoint system you are using to the remote desktop, so you can access any local documents and files, even those on USB memory sticks.