Herco van Brug wrote a great article on how to build a solid VDI/View Windows XP Template. Herco recently designed and implemented a large View environment and this article is the outcome. I only quoted the first paragraph as the article is subject to change. Please visit the source article for the full details, it is worth reading!
A basic Windows XP machine can do a lot of things. Apart from facilitating an environment for a user’s applications, it can do things like self maintenance, updates, hardware changes, etc. This is nice in a physical environment with lots of different pieces of hardware but in a virtual instance things hardly change, the environment is pretty much set and all tricks to speed things up usually have an adverse effect on the infrastructure. All these virtual instances need to share the often rather limited amount of resources.
To keep things in check, there’s a lot of things that can be done to optimize an XP image for a virtual desktop. This guide is created from several documents that are already out there but also from our own experience and experience from a couple of other VDI specialists.
This guide is based on Windows XP because of its low resources usage compared to Vista and even Windows 7. The general idea however also applies to those versions although specific services and registry keys will most likely not work. Skipping Vista, the next version of this guide will focus on Windows 7.