I was wondering if someone could advise me on what options I have in terms of OS for a HP Thin Client, its a HP T5730 as far as I am aware it has 512MB Ram and a 1GB Flash. Is it possible to add an OS via a USB Stick/External HDD (a standard edition of XP, a version of Linux maybe) and/or upgraded the embedded OS? I am also struggling to find the Embedded version of XP... I have no experience with the embedded versions of windows, so any info would be gratefully received
Don't know anything about you computer but this may be what your looking for http://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/40191-Windows-Embedded-POSReady-2009
I have something similar. I attached an internal HDD to it and installed an ordinary XP Home. You can also run Puppy Linux from a USB stick, or external CDROM. DSL (Damn Small Linux) works nicely too. If you have a USB floppy drive, you can boot stuff from floppy as well. For instance DOS.
I got my thin client from someone who had "played" with it. There was no OS on it when I got it. But looking at the HP support site for it it seems one can reimage it with the original OS, which is very nice of them. I must confess I never liked this thin client idea. It looks great in theory, but put to practical use... Maybe in a public library for searching for books.
Flash drives are slow but that's not really a problem. You'll be able to run a stripped down version of standard XP in ramdisk mode on this kind of devices. I love ramdisks !