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I am slowly accumulating a bunch of old Wyse thin clients, running Windows Embedded Standard, and by the end of the year, I may have as many as 40 sitting in boxes behind my desk. I hate throwing out stuff if there’s still a way to use it, but I can’t see a way to redeploy these.

  • upgrading to Windows 7 Embedded would require a flash and ram upgrade kit from Dell, which if it’s available, is $300 or so a pop, I think

  • leaving them as Windows Embedded Standard means leaving them barely useful- they’re just plain underpowered, even as web kiosks (and since they have IE8 and can’t be directly upgraded, well, you know…)

Is there any way to hack these and put something like Wyse ThinOS on them?

1 Spice up
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Just went through this - I picked the route of taking them to the recycling center and getting a few bucks for pizza, rather than the “privilege” of paying Dell more $$ to get an upgrade, so the RDP client will connect to anything beyond a 2003 terminal server. This is a headache I don’t need. Someone once said thinclients were a huge cost savings, now it’s nothing but cost after cost and headache. Thanks Dell for taking something, then trying to monetizing it to the point that you’ve killed it.

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i believe windows makes a thin-client like OS, i believe it was called microsoft steady-state. its worth a look since you can grab a regular workstation and lock it down