With 169 converted so far, Deyaolu said the savings in terms of maintenance costs equates to one extra technician and the hardware replacement costs are likely to reduce from A$25,000 (US$19,340) to $5,000 over the next year.

"The Wyse Streaming Manager solution takes up about the same space as a monitor and has proven to be a reliable system in terms of delivering XP to the desktop," he said. "Management is centralized and there are no moving parts in the devices so you avoid disk failures."

Another immediate benefit is with image changes as IT staff now do not need to physically check each machine.

Every machine that is assigned to an image has the same software and can be changed centrally on the server.

"Once it is streamed it is in cache so it's like a normal PC," Deyaolu said. "Where you have issues is with the amount of data people want to move [but] it does everything a basic education institution would require and can run Adobe Photoshop and Publisher."