Windows Embedded Standard 7 systems can be made to look, smell and taste like the full Enterprise or Ultimate Windows 7, except they have much less baggage, and are thus lighter and possibly snappier (and they can be built with additional features that are not available in the main versions.) As some people here have brilliantly shown, most of the differences can be worked around using available techniques and a little applied ingenuity. No doubt some folk are using Windows Embedded in some form or other (e.g.ThinPC or a WES7 build), as their main Windows 7 and haven't looked back. It would be useful to know if anything doesn't work, or works badly, or partially, and anything that actually works well, or seems to be better than under a main version. This would be in both hardware and software categories. Is there anything really weird or baffling happening differently compared to main versions (either way round - on the same machine). It may just be an opinion - for instance, I think that networking in general is more reliable under most of the WES7 systems I have tried than the main Windows 7 versions. There may also be solid benchmarks that some of you have already run or could yet run that would show strengths or weaknesses.
I'm using TPC as the main OS. Couple of irritating things- IE8 doesnt store browsing history. The registry has a list of visited url's like regular win7 but nothing happens when one clicks on the drop down arrow in IE8 address bar. Trying to make a ERD commander 6.5 disk in TPC always fails in the end with "Class not registered" error. When I moved to another PC with regular win7, it worked fine. If one doesnt have net 4.0 installed, anything dependant doesnt work. I also found that wei rating would always abort with a media decoder error. Turns out that process needs to load a couple of test wmv files which fails unless one has added the codecs package.
TPC install doesnt have a bootfix.bin. Bootfix.bin prints that "Press any key to boot from CD" line. So?
I have created a Minimal Configuration x64 command line version with not much beyond basic networking/DX added that makes for an utterly incredible gaming OS - with no pagefile. Absolutely flies compared even to the mighty Server 2008 R2 since there's nothing but the absolute essentials running. Highly recommend it. Played BF2142 for hours yesterday without the slightest hitch. Incidentally the x64 versions seem to come in not much bigger at all than the x86 ones vs the usual roughly double space needed on regular 7 x64. Only thing I've failed to get working yet is Windows VPC/XP Mode... but VirtualBox fills that gap just fine! Conclusions: For "desktop" users? Thin PC is the best 7 edition bar none. For "advanced" users who don't mind spending hours tweaking and dealing with the occasional broken feature? Dive in to WES7. Pick a usage scenario, and tweak to that purpose. It is well worth it.
I use wes7 toolkit to create some projects have in mind and at the moment the resul is very nice. I create a thin os for normal pc, a workstation os but that can run in old pc, a kind of thinpc but with all .net framework, premium codecs and without wtite filters. This one works very very well, run smooth and fast, and at the moment not find any compatibility issue, run stable per days without a problem. My future project will be an os very tiny for make iis server, no more and no less, this os will be only a web server. Other future projext will be like bbqathon, create a tiny os only for games.
Just a little note then: be sure to include .NET and install the VC++ content from the AIO runtimes pack many of us used with Thin PC. A lot of games will fail with "side by side configuration" errors otherwise. Oh, and you may need to add things to the firewall manually for online games as you won't get the popup messages from the firewall asking for access. End result seems to run very nicely with 4GB and no pagefile.
Yup, I've recently set up WES7 as my main OS, with many of the regular features I don't use stripped out. Less disk space usage than Ultimate, but I can still use features such as domain join, IIS, or Remote Desktop server. It also works well for setting up a portable Windows setup on USB Anyone looking for an x64 equivalent to Thin PC should look into POSReady 7. It's essentially the same, with only a slightly different set of preconfigured packages, such as preinstalled .NET frameworks.
Actually it's also great for a PC with less than modern hardware in it. Just for a laugh I tried a 1GB box with an *ancient* (~12 year old) 10GB hard drive in it that is utterly unusable for the sound of disk thrashing with any 7/2K8... It's fine. No pagefile, everything done in memory. Remarkable.