Windows Thin PC: Windows, Slimmed Down
by Andrew Cunningham on April 28, 2011 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Windows
- Operating Systems
- Microsoft
Ultimately, Windows Thin PC is a very interesting piece of software that is hamstrung by both timing and licensing issues.
On the licensing end, this is only available to corporate customers via Microsoft’s Software Assurance program (and also to OEMs, whether under the Windows Thin PC name or the former Windows Embedded Standard moniker). A specialized, compact version of Windows that strips out most extraneous features but still maintains compatibility with existing Windows software could easily find a home on netbooks or on older machines or in certain home server configurations, but consumers and enthusiasts are left with no (legal) way to obtain it (however, I again note that you can apply many of Thin PC’s settings to a vanilla Windows install to reduce the OS’s footprint without resorting to dodgy third-party tools).
And that brings us to timing, the fly in the ointment that really ruins any potential utility this product might have had: consider that Windows Thin PC is being offered only to businesses, many of which are still in the midst of rolling out (or planning to roll out) Windows 7. Consider, also, that Windows 8 appears at the moment to be on schedule for a late 2012 release, some 18 months from now.
Corporate IT is not a fast-moving beast – there’s little chance that Windows Thin PC, which isn’t even officially available in its final form, can be approved, tested and deployed in a business that is in the early stage of deploying thin clients to users. For businesses already using thin clients, chances are that they already have their servers and clients figured out, and it may be that Windows Thin PC offers few incentives to switch, especially if they’re using a non-Microsoft product.
Even if Windows Thin PC makes a lot of sense for your business, you have at best a little over a year before Windows 8 comes along and the cycle begins anew, and that sort of turnaround time isn’t going to be appealing to risk-averse IT managers.
I think Windows Thin PC is neat. I think it shows that the Windows platform can be flexible and modular, and can potentially be adapted from the fat client OS that it is today into something a little more cloud-friendly. That being said, I don’t think that this particular niche product is going to have much time to find its niche, and that most interest in it is going to be academic rather than practical.
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.