What do we need to have our terminal computers boot from LAN and have everything on the server instead from locally on a hard disk? Thank youSystems Engineer

you need to have some special hardware called Thin Clients.There are lot of vendors who deal with http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/index.asp http://www.virmansec.com/blogs/skhairuddin

Ok so you mean this cannot be done on a normal diskless pc? Also what service do I need on the server serving the data to that client? especially if my servers are Windows Server.Systems Engineer

i already mentioned you that those devices are quite special so normal pc cannot do that becasue without hard drive they cannot boot remotely there shoul some base os so that they can be able to connecto to the server. You should have teminal server service running on the server and offcourse there should be a terminal server licensing server as well to serv the licenses to the clients.http://www.virmansec.com/blogs/skhairuddin

Ok Syed, last question, if we have a disk on the pc, does it work with Windows PE and the terminal server service?Systems Engineer

Hi, Diskless workstations deployed in Windows Terminal Server need a third party tool support as Syed said. Under normal circumstances you can only use to deploy the operating system by Windows Deploy Service (WDS) PXE boot. The thin client or PC boot from Windows PE by PXE. But you cannot directly from the thin client PXE boot into the Terminal Services desktop environment.Technology changes life

Windows PE is merely used to deply the operating systems on the computers its not a full fledge oshttp://www.virmansec.com/blogs/skhairuddin

You can boot diskless PCs using PXE. It will "remote boot" some OS to operate the PC. It can be Windows (XP/7...), Linux, or even WinPE. There are "Terminal Server Clients" for all these platforms. You can use commercial products to boot your diskless PCs (HP Image Manager, Double Take Flex, Wyse Streaming manager...). You can also use free alternatives such as openthinclient (openthinclients.org) or ltsp (linux terminal server project) HP D/L Image Manager link is broken, but it is available here http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Y52W9Q6A trial version (3 months, 20 clients IIRC). You still need to go to HP image manager download page to get a trial license: https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=IMTRIAL (follow the process up to "get license") openthinclients: http://openthinclient.org For the WinPE alternative, you could try to see these pages: http://wiki.contribs.org/PXE_booting_to_BARTPE and UBCD4WIN (to create the iso): http://www.ubcd4win.com/ So yes, a diskless PC can be used as a thin client. But you will have to get trained a little to all these stuffs. DHCP, PXE, TFTP are the first portion of the learning...

OK, based off this information, I have an older PC. It will run winXP, but it is VERY slow. I would like to get something that will boot the computer, and launch it right to something that will connect to our Terminal Server, and take less than 5 min to boot, as win XP does on this computer. Will open thin client work?