Turning old laptops into TS clients?

[Sam_Brown]

Hi guys,

We have a load of old laptops here and was wondering if anyone knew of a clean and easy way to turn them into TS Clients?

Heard a rumor there was a micro edition of windows that came with just an RDP client but not found anything on google so probably a wild goose chase. I have heard of the posibility of using some flavours of Linux in order to do this though and wondered if anyone had any experience or advice on them?

Thanks in advance,

[DT2]

I'd just lock them down real tight with GPO and add TS shortcut to the desktop.
Saves £££s on licences and new software.

[strawberry]

slim down a 7 install ( or use thin pc ) and change the shell to run a rdp file instead. Not ever tried it with wireless though.

[morganw]

You can do it with a local install of Thinstation that will connect to wireless.

[danbuntu]

you could try winTPC which is the slimmed down windows 7. It's more a web client then a thin client. I was playing with over the weekend and it's pretty good.
You can download a 90 day trial from microsoft

[glennda]

look on @TheScarfedOne s blog - he's got a good write up on thin pc

[teky]

Yeah, do as glennda said and check TheScarfedOne's blogs, easy to do with SCCM and Thin PC, we're in the middle of deploying it to our rather large batch of Asus 900's, will find out how well it runs over wireless over the comming weeks connecting to a RDS Session Host farm

[Bezwick]

I attempted a similar thing a couple of years ago, i had mixed success with thinstation however i often found problems getting drivers for some of the more obscure drivers.
So i tried with a standard copy of Windows XP, used RT Lite to strip out all the components i didnt need and just installed a raw version of it. Once all the drivers are installed it boots up pretty quick even on an old laptop (remember the only update you need from an old version of XP is the latest RDP client).
Next i created a user called logon and stripped its profile down to the fastest performance settings and turned off all sounds.
Then i installed steady state and locked down the the "logon" profile and modfied the registry to set the Shell key to point to this vbs file

Option Explicit
'On Error Resume Next

Dim objShell

Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

Do
If (objShell.AppActivate("Remote Desktop") = False) Then
objShell.Run "mstsc.exe c:\remote.rdp"
WScript.Sleep 5000
Else
WScript.Sleep 3000
End If
Loop

This script was poached off someone on here, really sorry as i cant remember who from. sorry sorry sorry.

This all works really well and all the laptops logon really quick and automatically connect wirelessly to the terminal server. We have some Toshiba Sat Pro A10's running this way and even they get to the logon prompt in under 2 mins.

[sted]

ive used ubuntu on desktops as a "thin client" os boots up they login and get access to firefox (sees daft to start a ts session to quickly look something up on the net) and rdp shortcut on desktop boots on some cruddy old acer f1b's in <1 min