back to article Microsoft to release Windows thin PC in late June

Microsoft has pushed out a final test build of its Windows Thin PC (WinTPC). The company dished out the Release Candidate yesterday, but the final version of WinTPC won't arrive until 30 June, said Microsoft. "Customers like the reduced footprint of WinTPC – the machines they will likely use it on often have less disk space …

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  1. The Alpha Klutz

    Less disk space?

    Why isn't regular Windows 7 like that.

    Good grief, would you like an Operating System with your 30GB of bloat sir?

    1. Elmer Phud
      IT Angle

      SSD's?

      Have they woken up and realised that SSD is becoming popular to the point of devices not having spinning metal lumps in them? Sounds good but you also wonder if they can now offer an O/S that they are happy with that looks like and performs like W7 why the f haven't they done it before. Plus, if they are happy without the bloat they could have made a mint from those who got fed up and ventured over to the dark side and picked up a Penguin.

      Can't work out if it's IT or financial

      1. dssf

        "Why the F didn't they do this before?"?

        Well, until Ubuntu and OLPC showed viability, until Google Chrome laptops started taking up more traction, and Apple iPads started skewing the market and taking the world by storm, ms could give a rat's ass since nobody before then/that time was pushing an innovative thing.

        It wasn't in ms' best interests to gut or cannibalize windows to that extent. The more bloat in the OS, the more business for AV /anti malware vendors, and the more the various major governments can bury in that code to monitor our banking and communications. But, now, they have no choice.

        But, probably, the real answer is that their shareholders now are demanding they respond to the various pads, slates, and tablets lets ms look like it has run out of ideas

  2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Coat

    As if this were really true these days

    Quote:-

    "Customers like the reduced footprint of WinTPC – the machines they will likely use it on often have less disk space than brand new machines and WinTPC helps to ensure they will have adequate space,

    Is the Windows 7 Bloat that bad these days?

    Is the cost of a 40Gb HDD really so extortionate?

    Or is this to make space for all the other multi GB of BLOATWARE that OEM's insist on loading on top of Windows before they ship their PC's?

    Actually it is rather difficult to find a PC with anything less that a 160Gb HDD these days.

    Mines the one with very large pockets. In them I have at least one DEC RK05 2.4Mb disk pack.

    1. TS

      Windows *THIN*

      "Is the Windows 7 Bloat that bad these days? Is the cost of a 40Gb HDD really so extortionate?"

      It's not for OEMs building home machines with 500GB drives. It's for companies that have hundreds or thousands of legacy machines with 40GB drives that want to repurpose them from full user machines to thin client machines.

      There's a lot going on with Citrix, VDI, cloud computing. Companies need to get rid of XP on those old machines due to all the security issues, and install something newer... without Win TPC, they might go with *nix or a bare-metal hypervisor like nxtop or xenclient.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Not for the rest of us

    "The final code of the product, which is built on top of Embedded Standard edition of Windows 7 Service Pack 1, will only be made available to customers who pay up for Software Assurance licences"

    So that will be back to hacked XP VLK installs for Joe Public on your old P3 machine then? (allegedly......)

  4. BristolBachelor Gold badge

    And the point is?

    I don't see the point really, if it still has disk and still runs windows and applications, then you still need to manage it and it still borks itself over some obscure setting in the registry that means the only option is to nuke it from orbit.

    To my mind a thin PC has a screen & keyboard (mouse if you're lucky), and only enough flash to store the singular program that it runs, which just displays the graphics packets that come down the wire & send back what the user does. Everything else can live on the monstor in the basement.

  5. fireman sam

    RE: And the point is?

    As it's built on top of WES7 and, as alluded to in the article, I'm guessing that this will come with EWF or HORM enabled so that subsequent writes to the OS partition won't be allowed.

  6. Bilgepipe

    More Microsoft BS

    >>> Customers like the reduced footprint of WinTPC

    How can there be customers of an unreleased product? Smells like the Samsung Galaxy Tab bullsh!t all over again...

    1. OffBeatMammal

      not final != no customers

      just because it's not a final gold release doesn't mean there are not people using it in the real world

      look at how many Web 2.0 sites slap Beta on or how many people rush out and use preview builds of Windows, Office or Visual Studio in their environment to get an idea of how well they will perform when the real thing launches

    2. TS

      RE: More MS BS

      "How can there be customers of an unreleased product?"

      Just because it's "unreleased" doesn't mean customers can't access it. That's the whole point of BETA testing.

  7. Barney Carroll
    FAIL

    What do you call a payed-for contradiction?

    A rip off.

    "…the machines they will likely use it on often have less disk space than brand new machines…"

    …followed by:

    "…built on top of Embedded Standard edition of Windows 7 Service Pack 1"

    Your machine can't handle modern software for reasons of power and memory. So you pay through the teeth to install Windows 7, which barely functions. Because it's all your machine can do to actually run Win 7 without any actual applications running on it, you need to pay to install a Win-7 only thin client. What was the original problem again?

    If you're using an old machine, how about stick with XP and use your existing software? Or free web apps with cloud storage? Or install Unix?

  8. maclovinz
    Pint

    Grinding Sound...

    I hear the grinding drive sound coming soon....

    Load, load load load load...ah, here we- ah load load....

    Resources are still an issue. Period.

    Pint?

  9. Peter 39
    FAIL

    bloatware

    So bloatware will now be server-based rather than consuming your local drive?

    And this is better than Linux - why ??

  10. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    I thought this was a new thin client

    And it turns out to be just a cutdown edition of WIndows. We can all do that, with Win Lite,and probably other available tools too.

    1. Mr Floppy

      nlite vLite 7lite

      Dino said there wouldn't be a version for win7. I guess MS needed to fill the void there. Mind you, they want you to pay for it.

  11. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Bloooooated

    "Is the Windows 7 Bloat that bad these days?"

    Yes. It takes boatloads of disk space and buckets of RAM. Objective reviews have shown it to really not be much better than Vista in this regards, it's just that (high end) system specs jumped enough in the intervening years to make Windows users not complain about the bloat as much.

    Ubuntu is considered bloated among Linux distros, and it'll run comfortably in 512MB of RAM, and fit on a 4GB disk with room to spare (and keep in mind, the Ubuntu install includes OpenOffice and some other applications, it'd increase Windows' footprint even more to throw on the comparable applications.) Of course, if you just want a glorified terminal or web browsing box, Damn Small Linux fits in 100MB of disk space and actually runs well in 64MB of RAM. PuppyLinux is more fully featured, but still fits in 100-200MB of disk space (depending on version) and 128MB of RAM.

    "Is the cost of a 40Gb HDD really so extortionate?"

    A 40 Gb hard drive won't hold Win7, 40 gigabits is only 5GB. A 40GB HD (or whatever the smallest one can actually buy any more) is cheap. A 32GB SSD is expensive enough that if I spent for one, I'd rather use that space for my files and not to squeeze on a gigantic OS and apps. If it was some fixed-purpose usage, I'd much rather get something like a 4GB one.

    So, the target for this is probably organizations that buy boatloads of computers (and will not take the radical route of using actual thin clients and Linux Terminal Server Project or if they are Windows-centric Terminal Server or Citrix.)

    When I worked at the University's surplus, a large portion of the computers were from the university hospital. The university hospital special-ordered Dells with *no* sound (the sound was onboard, but Dell would subtract some small amount per unit and just not install any audio jacks), CD readers instead of burners or DVDs (and sometimes no CD drive at all), smaller than stock hard disks and probably less RAM than stock (they kept running Windows 2000 for a loooong time). When you're buying lots of 100 or even 1000 PCs at a time, this fiddly stuff adds up to tens of thousands of dollars saved.

    1. Antti Roppola

      Same old, same old...

      " Yes. It takes boatloads of disk space and buckets of RAM. Objective reviews have shown it to really not be much better than Vista in this regards, it's just that (high end) system specs jumped enough in the intervening years to make Windows users not complain about the bloat as much."

      That sounds like every Windoiws release I have ever known (and that's going back a ways). The software has always been somewhat ahead of the hardware curve.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Objective reviews"

      Damn straight. I'm getting pretty tired of the subjective reviews.

      "Windows 7 is GREAT"

      Why?

      "Because it's WINDOWS 7"

      Why is it great though?

      "Because it's not Vista!"

      Yeah but what is actually good about it?

      "It's Windows 7"

      So?

      "Windows 7 is GREAT"

      Why?

      Trying to get someone to actually pin down a reason why they like it, other than, "Because it's Windows 7 derp" is like pulling teeth from a drunken Rhino, with a wooden cooking spoon, and both arms tied behind your back, while you and the Rhino OD on Viagra.

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