I recently installed Embedded standard 2009 on this thin client that has a 2GB disk on module IDE flash drive. Since this was a success and that I would like to go as far as to enable aero in my remote desktop connection to the home workstation, I attempted to install Thin PC on it, because there is no image / license provided by HP beyond WES2009. The installer told me that 4GB was required to install. So I ordered a 4GB compact flash card and Mini IDE compact flash adapter. This part should be ok because some others have does it before me, and wven with large laptop hard drives. What I am wondering, is whether the Thin Client will behave as a regular PC once Windows Thin PC is installed or is there some kind of BIOS event that checks for a legit HP image before letting you boot the thin client ? Anyway I will find out soon enough but I wanted to know if someone else had a favorable results ins installing Thin PC on a true thin client so I do not waste my time...
I have a couple of hp t5550 thin clients (they had WCE on them) that i turned into PC's with windows embedded 7. And they preform/behave just like a normal Windows 7 PC. What i did was installed more RAM (4GB) and a bigger flash module. I then downloaded the image for the HP T5570e (the t5550/t5565/t5570 are all the same HW just different OS/RAM/FLASH DRIVES). The only restrictions that the image install has is the BIOS model number check. However you can get around this by using imagex to install the image and not use the default hp IBRPE.EXE which checks the FLASH.IBR image for the bios info. The other option you have is to just download the windows 7 embedded install and use that. Then download the correct drivers. The t5550 have VIA CPU/chipset so i just downloaded from VIA website. Windows Thin PC/Embedded doesnt do any checking at all.
Wow great info thanks - did not even hope to get answers Will try the imagex suggestion. Did you notice any significant advantages to using either WES7 or Thin PC or are they pretty much equivalents ? When you mention "The other option you have is to just download the windows 7 embedded install and use that." do you mean the trial runtime image available on microsoft site or do you mean the ThinPC image that has an installer ? Because I thought that WES7 can only be installed fron an image whereas ThinPC has an installer much like Windows 7... Also do you know of any 64-bit 64-bit image from HP ?
Thin PC and POSReady 7 are just WES7 with a preconfigured set of packages and a "regular" installer. They are all built from the same WES7 packages, so there's not really any difference. The WES7 IBW images (not the Toolkit) can boot from DVD and runs a different installer where you can deploy the OS based on an included template, or you can select a custom set of drivers and packages. If you're fine with the packages included in Thin PC there's no point doing a custom WES7 install. There's no x64 version of Thin PC, but you can use POSReady 7 instead. It's almost the same, just a few packages that are in one OS but not in the other (I don't recall which ones exactly). You can always install any missing packages later using dism anyway.
The main difference is in licensing. WES does not require activation, while ThinPC does need MAK or KMS activation sebus
Ok so for my goal it is definitely Thin PC x86 that I need. Thanks to all for the help in understanding all this !
I tried to apply the 1.6GB WES7SP1 image from HP for the T5740e that has 4GB flash from the flash.ibr file (that is a really a wim file), on my 4GB compact flash card, and strangely the image is over 5GB so it doesn't fit. I do not get it, how can this be the image for a thin client that has 4GB flash in all configurations and the image not fit in 4GB when applied to the OS drive?
I had a t5565 that I had to upgrade the flash drive on, so I made some notes and I'll share with you what I did. This is a copy/paste from my notes. You have to install the MDT to get the files needed to reimage called 'imagex'. The file I downloaded from Microsoft is: MicrosoftDeploymentToolkit2012_x86.msi Then I pulled the files from: C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86 Using imageX to image a flash drive: 1) Image a USB drive with the t5570 windows files. 2) Add files from the imagex folder to the root of the USB drive. 3) On the USB drive go to the 'IBRPE' folder and edit 'THINSTATE.CMD' @ECHO OFF CLS diskpart :exit 4) Boot the USB drive. 5) It will boot into a DOS type window with 'diskpart' running to format the flash drive and use the following commands: list disk (should be disk 0) select disk 0 (or whatever is correct) clean create partition primary select partition 1 (< has nothing to do with disk number) active assign letter=f (or whatever you want) exit 6) Format the flash drive and name it. format F: /q /fs:NTFS /v:SYSTEM 7) Image the system using imagex (x: drive is where the files are) imagex /apply x:\flash.ibr 1 f:\ 8) Takes about 5 minutes. When the command prompt is returned, wait about a minute then turn off the system, pull the USB stick and turn it back on. From here the system will go through the normal Setup For The First Time business. If anyone isn't familiar with how to log on as Administrator, log off normally and while it is logging you off, press and hold the left shift key until the log on window appears. The username is 'Administrator' with capital "A" and the password is the same, again with a capital "A". Special thanks to Tahunasky on the imagex reference!
Has anyone used the DMI Tools (or something else) to convert a t5550 or t5565 to a t5570 so the image can be installed natively? I used b2800.exe to make changes to the model number and serial number but it didn't work. There is a third field that I also tried entering 10501 for XPe and 11501 for WES into the empty slot (50 and 38). I've already got 2009 on my thin client, but I'd like to hack it further. Any ideas? If someone can run this command on their system: b2800 /g >output.txt (no space after the >). This will create a text file that we might compare. If you edit out your serial number, at least leave the first 3-5 characters intact.
I got it all working - I used a 16gb compact flash card (had to find one that has the fixed disk bit set in the controller) and I also had to acquire the PCI riser kit and a NVS 300 PCIE x1 graphics card. Now it all works... In the end I installed WES7 x64 with the thin client template - the HP image was not installing correctly after being deployed with ImageX, after all it was for the T5740e and not the T5730w. It failed after rebooting the first time in the "Setup for the first time" phase - with a message like "Windows could not start all services and features". It is now working beautifully
The graphics card for those who wonder is because ATI never made a decent windows 7 driver for the x1250 that is embedded in the t5730 so I dropped in a dx10 NVIDIA NVS 300. I connect remotely to Windows server 2008 R2 with full aero mode. Much nicer than my original HP RGS trials.
At the same time this is so ironic that microsoft has dropped aero in windows 8 ! before installing server 2008 r2 I installed server 2012 which is nice but had to dump it simply because aero is gone ! Anyway I'm out now.
URL="h??p:\\xxx.transcend-info.com/industry/products_details.asp?catno=2&serno=11&modno=14&Func1No=" CF200i Transcend CompactFlash 16GB Industrial Grade
Kingston 16GB Ultimate 266X CompactFlash Compact Flash CF Type I Flash Memory Card CF/16GB-U2 about 30$
Thanks for the info - I will have to get one and try. I had a Kingston 8 GB CF (CF/8GB) which wouldnt boot once W7ES was installed.