Running XPe on thin clients

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
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Guest

Hi!

I'm new at XPe world and I'm considering to use this technology to keep
alive my legacy machines.
I intend to have machines without HD and booting from servers through PXE.
Also, those machines should have some local programs such as IE, PowerPoint
Viewer and ICA/RDP client to connect to Terminal Server (Windows 2003). Even
more, they should have network connectivity and mapped drivers.
Well, at first, am I in right way choosing XPe? Could you suggest where I
might find getting started papers?

Thank you in advance.
 
Andreiwid,

From the brief specs you showed it does seem that XPe will suite for it. But you should be aware about licensing and some legal
restriction existing on XPe (no MS Office, etc.).
From the description it seemed that you want something like remotely booted thin client machine.

Here is the product docs on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xpehelp/html/startpage.asp
The Remote Boot (PXe based) feature of XPE: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/remboot/html/xpconRemoteBootOverview.asp
Licensing and XPe FAQ: http://www.bsquare.com/licenses/licensesandproducts/winxpembedded.asp,
http://www.bsquare.com/licenses/resourcecenter/faqs.asp
http://www.bsquare.com/licenses/resourcecenter/faqswinxpembed.asp
 
If you are PXE booting there are several issues you need to be aware of

1) The image is downloaded as a ramdisk so you need to have enough memory on
the target to both store the image and to run it.

2) Make sure that you leave some space for data files in the image as the
ramdisk will need to create/update files as it boots. If you don't leave at
least a few MB of space the o/s or your applications may not start.

3) Some PXE implementations have problems loading large images. I have had
experience of systems where I cannot load an image larger than 128MB and others
where the limit is a lot higher.

David
 
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