Performance experiences for running Windows 7 on a Thin-Client?
- by Peter Bernier
Has anyone else tried installing Windows 7 on thin-client hardware? I'd be very interested to hear about other people's experiences and what sort of hardware tweaks they had to do to get it to work. (Yes, I realize this is completely unsupported.. half the fun of playing with machines and beta/RC versions is trying out unsupported scenarios. :) )
I managed to get Windows 7 installed on a modified Wyse 9450 Thin-Client and while the performance isn't great, it is usable, particularly as an RDP workstation. Before installing 7, I added another 256Mb of ram (512 total), a 60G laptop hard-drive and a PCI videocard to the 9450 (this was in order to increase the supported screen resolution).
I basically did this in order to see whether or not it was possible to get 7 installed on such minimal hardware, and see what the performance would be. For a 550Mhz processor, I was reasonably impressed. I've been using the machine for RDP for the last couple of days and it actually seems slightly snappier than the default Windows XP embedded install (although this is more likely the result of the extra hardware). I'll be running some more tests later on as I'm curious to see particularl whether the streaming video performance will improve.
I'd love to hear about anyone's experiences getting 7 to work on extremely low-powered hardware. Particularly any sort of tweaks that you've discovered in order to increase performance..
