Desktop

Being overweight is probably one of the most common problems we face when getting older, and the same actually goes for PC’s. When they age we start to notice that a “bloated” OS just doesn’t cut it anymore. For most companies this usually means that it’s time to replace their desktops for brand new state of the art equipment. Of course with technology like VDI and/or Terminal Services there’s no need to do so. You can easily keep on using your “old” hardware when utilizing any of these two technologies. (Of course I prefer VDI.)

For an optimal experience I usually advise stripping the fat client OS to it’s bare minimum. But this isn’t always necessary as Justin Emerson(VM Junkie) points out in the two articles he recently published on his blog.

The first solution that I recommend to Microsoft Software Assurance customers is Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs. This is one of those lesser-known Microsoft OS products, but I think it’s pretty cool. It’s a stripped-down version of Windows XP intended for legacy systems that you can run on very old hardware – down to a 233MHz Pentium. It requires very little disk footprint, and what I like about it is that the default install is very small, as you will see.

From Microsoft’s website, one of the primary use cases of WinFLP is “use existing hardware as Terminal Services clients.” While they’re referring to Terminal Services by name, there’s no reason we can’t use it for Citrix ICA or in our case, VMware View!

Justin wrote two excellent articles of which the above is just a short outtake. These articles explain which steps you would need to take to turn your old overweight windows desktops into thin clients and are a must read for everyone interested in Desktop Virtualization! (Screenshots included)

Making a thin client on fat hardware: part 1
Making a thin client on fat hardware: part 2