Well I was never clever enough to go to Oxford University, but as one of the worlds leading education establishments for the last 400yrs they must be doing something right. That means that they are thought leaders and we should listen to what they do, well I always preferred the teachers at school who sounded like they had done what they were talking about. Here is an excerpt from a yahoo newsflash " By using Sun Rays across all university sites, Oxford is saving roughly $10,000 USD per year on power, reducing heat generation, cutting administration time and much more.", The whole article is here: Oxford University saves $10,000 of power costs.

So Oxford university has just saved loads of electrical power, improved security, provided more desk space for people to work, made it easier to maintain and swap any equipment.

You can change a SunRay in less time it takes to order a pizza. I call this Pizza service time or PST. It must be pretty good and not just a Sun idea as Wyse and other are copying the SunRay thin client idea.

No data is stored locally but is on a cluster of server computers, thus no need for laptop/PC backups or restores. Also, no data to be stolen locally, thus many of your security problems are solved.

And they do not need to add more cooling and refigration as the thin client SunRays use less power than Laptops or PC's.

Remember thin client SunRays provide access to MS windows applications as well as Unix applications. Now there is a interesting fact that many do not know about. (I was corrected that the application runs on the servers, but we all knew that, this is why I never got into Oxford or Cambridge).

I was always a bit more of a techy and I did live closer to Cambridge than Oxford, so I had more of a preference for Cambridge University. However, I was not smart enough to go their either, but then again I never applied. Now what is Cambridge doing in the area of smart computing.