Windows Thin PC: Windows, Slimmed Down
by Andrew Cunningham on April 28, 2011 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Windows
- Operating Systems
- Microsoft
It's unfortunate that Windows Thin PC's licensing terms are so restrictive, because it's largely similar to the standard editions of Windows 7 in terms of what third-party programs can be installed - I could see Windows Thin PC being popular among the subset of the Windows community that uses third-party modding tools like nLite or vLite to strip absolutely everything they can out of a standard Windows install.
To satisfy the tinkerer in me, I decided to try installing a few things in Windows Thin PC and seeing how it reacted - what do all of the space-saving cuts do to impact normal use of the operating system?
For starters, standard Windows 7 drivers installed on my Thin PC just fine, and Thin PC doesn’t disable Aero or the audio service or anything to save on resources (in Windows Server, for example, these services must first be installed and then enabled if you want them).
My first roadblock came when I tried to install the Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus program, which threw up a compatibility error message and wouldn’t install. If I had to guess, I'd say that this has something to do with the absence of Windows Defender in Thin PC, since it and MSE share spyware definitions and some other elements.
Bonk.
For the sake of testing I grabbed a copy of AVG Free and it installed just fine - as we'll see below, most standard Windows programs install on Thin PC just as they would on Windows 7, so it seems safe to assume that most other standard antivirus packages will work without issue. After Windows Thin PC's eventual release, we may see an updated version of Security Essentials that supports the new OS.
My computer now protected from viruses, I downloaded Chrome and set up my sync account. I encountered no problems watching YouTube or Hulu videos (meaning that Flash was intact), though in general Web browsing Windows Thin PC’s missing fonts do very occasionally cause rendering problems.
There’s surprisingly little to report, in most cases: I began by installing smaller packages and then worked my way up. Adobe Reader and the .NET Framework 4.0 installed fine, as did the Windows Live Essentials 2011 suite. Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, likewise, installed and ran normally, as did Photoshop CS5. Clearly, there's nothing preventing more complex software from running on Windows Thin PC.
...At least, as long as said software doesn't depend on something that's missing. My efforts to install SQL Server 2008 were thwarted by the absense of pre-4.0 versions of the .NET Framework, and since versions 3.5 and earlier are normally baked into Windows 7, there was nothing I could do to get it installed (though I'm sure, with enough effort and collaboration, the Internet could have gotten it working).
Enough of the productivity programs! My next task was to download and install Steam and a couple of simple games - the DirectX diagnostic tool showed that DirectX 11 was present and accounted for, but I wanted to leave as few stones unturned as possible. I noticed absolutely no issues with Torchlight, Audiosurf, or World of Goo, three different games from three different developers, and noticed no differences between Windows Thin PC and regular old Windows - the games and their dependencies installed and ran without a hitch.
If you're running more resource-intensive games, you may need to turn virtual memory back on, but I could see something like Windows Thin PC finding a niche among the same gamers who religiously shut off their antivirus whenever they go to play something - the people who want to get the most out of their gaming rig's every megabyte.
So, with the sole exception of Microsoft Security Essentials, so far every Windows program I tried installed and launched successfully on Windows Thin PC, and even after installing all of the programs listed above (with the exception of SQL Server 2008) I was only using around 10 GB of my hard drive, just a little more than a stock Windows 7 Ultimate install on the same computer. Turning virtual memory back on would bump this up by a couple of gigabytes, but that’s still pretty impressive reduction in disk usage. It's not perfect, but I'm sure Windows Thin PC could find a niche among low-resource computing enthusiasts and gamers who want to get the most out of their system's every gigabyte if Microsoft ever chooses to release it (or something like it) out into the wild.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
46 Comments
View All Comments
Bob-o - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
Agreed. I know it wasn't really the focus of the article, but. . . what a pathetic thin client platform. Microsoft, go get some tips from Oracle's Sun Ray.Spivonious - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
Agreed. This seems more like "Windows Lite" than a true thin client OS. We have Wyse thin clients at work and all they do is boot and then connect to a hosted virtual machine.Samus - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
I don't mean to dig up an old thread, but I wanted to comment on this product AFTER RTM, which was July 2011, 3 months after this article was posted.I've installed OSX 10.5.8, 10.6.3, and a variety of Linux distro's on my HP Mini. I decided to give Win7ThinPC a shot. Since the Mini has a pathetic Sandisk uSSD with a 40MB/sec ATA4 (PATA) interface, it is just slightly faster than a Class 10 SDHC card.
I've run Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit, which took up ~10GB of the SSD, and it was slow, but usable. Thin PC is faster. Boot times, logon times, suspend/resume, and overall snappyness are improved.
We're talking an Atom N270 1.6GHz dualcore CPU, which is patheticly slow, around the speed of a Pentium III 800MHz, so web browsing performance is not great, especially with flash content, so Thin PC doesn't help this, but it does reduce SSD access, which is good, because the SSD is slow.
What I'm getting at, is if you want to run Windows 7 from a MEMORY CARD, this is your best option.
I successfully embeeded and registered .NET 2.0 and 3.5 into Win7 Thin PC as well in order to run SyncToy and Paint.NET
Current volume licensing from Provantage and CDW puts this OS at $15/year/PC. Pretty good value if you plan on upgrading in a few years, anyway.
iwod - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
I am running Windows 7 on my LaptopPentium M, Dothan 1.8Ghz ( That is Single Core )
1GB DDR Ram
ATI X600 Gfx
For 70% of my work load this machine does fine. And i haven't tweaked anything yet. I suspect if it had a super fast SSD plus 4GB memory it would be just as fast as best in class PC in 90% of office situation.
formulav8 - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link
I actually installed Windows 7 - RC1 on a Pentium 3 - 1.13ghz laptop and 512 MB of sdram. Was VERY impressed with how well the response and performance was. Did basic things perfectly fine.I've started putting Win 7 Premium on some of the laptops I sell to customers (Mainly Pentium M Banias/Dothan based) and they are working just fine. Some of them can even do Aero (Like the NC6000's which use a Radeon 9600) if I remember corrently. So I am quite impressed overall with Windows 7.
Jason
SteelCity1981 - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
Seems like MS is copying RT by doing this. I mean you could make your own stripped down copy of Windows 7 with Se7en Lite.damianrobertjones - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
No, they're not. Windows XP was also available in the samd format.Mugur - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
I can find something usable here. One of my clients is preparing to throw Windows 7 Enterprise/Office 2010 to their old office PCs (1 core Celerons, 1-2 GB RAM, 40-80 GB hdd). They also have POSes currently on XP Pro with the same hardware...Also I would like to see this on the netbook crowd, instead of that ugly Starter Edition... But I'm afraid that the price is much higher.
Some of my coleagues encountered the current or previous Windows Embedded versions and there were quite a few quirks setting it up as a POS... This is probably just the next iteration of it, with a bit of a "cloud/thin PC" marketing flavor. But it has a logic for an App-V/MDV client...
lwatcdr - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
Windows 7 is actually pretty good at running on old hardware. My wife uses it on her many year old AMD Turon64 powered notebook. I do not remember how old it is but it uses PATA for the hard drive it that tells you anything. If anything you may need more drive space or better yet setup a NAS With roaming profiles. I have even run Windows 7 basic under virtualbox on my macbook with the memory in Virualbox set down to 512m with no problems. It will probably run just fine depending on the clock speed. If they are at least 1Ghz I wouldn't sweat it.Of course the idea of a 1+ghz gigabyte of ram system being used for a POS system is really just getting into the level of the surreal.
haplo602 - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
So basicaly the system is not different from a lightly tuned Win7 ? Ok the missing fonts are maybe the largest problem, but one can still install them later right ?I thought it would be a bare windows with terminal services and minimal desktop features. So far for MS effort to generate new revenue from the same box with different label.