[K12OSN] I need to make Flash work faster....wanna pitch in?

[David Trask]

I'm fishing for ideas.  Here's the deal....we have a pretty good K12LTSP
deployment here at school....every classroom and the lab.  And....to have
our cake and eat it too...you can access the Windows 2003 Terminal server
via rdesktop as well.  I have budgeted for a whole new lab this coming
school year.  All nice little thin-clients with LCD monitors.  I have a
few LTSP 150's and love them.  Looking forward to having a whole new lab
full.  I'm even going to be outfitting the library as well!  We use Flash
a lot for classes....sites such as www.brainpop.com  The problem becomes
once we get 10-20 kids online and using a lot of flash sites....they get
quite slow and my CPU goes through the roof....98-99%.  (dual Xeon 2.x
ghz....4 gigs RAM)  What I'm wondering is how we might be able to make
flash faster and work better.  I'm wondering if there was some way that
one could utilize the local RAM and CPU to run flash....I've heard of
local apps, but never actually tried setting it up.  Along the same lines
of the work being done with local devices at LTSP-by-the-SEA I'm wondering
if there's some way to "suck" the flash module down to the local
terminal....or even somehow make it a part of a special etherboot image
for my more powerful terminals.  (I realize I'm grasping straws here) 
Once the flash was on the terminal I have no idea how we'd tell Mozilla or
Firefox where it is....unless we could symlink somehow.  In any
case....anyone got ANY ideas how to make this work?  It's a bit of an
issue for me....or maybe some of you have found something that works
better....if so share it with me *please*.

David N. Trask
Technology Teacher/Coordinator
Vassalboro Community School
dtrask at vcs.u52.k12.me.us
(207)923-3100