Windows 8 & 8.1

burlmart wrote:

Gdetrailer wrote:

burlmart wrote:
Gdetrailer

I often wonder if the IBM mainframe computer/minicomputer with dozens of dum terminals for enterprise didn;t make more sense than PC upgrades to 'personalized' OSs every 5 years.

The 'personalized' desire could have remained in the court of Atari and Commodore.

Actually there are many businesses today running what we used to call Dumb Terminals.

They call them "Win Terminals" or "Win Terms", aka "diskless boot workstations".

These are nothing more than a PC terminal (no internal HD, optical drive and many do not have USB running a virtual Windows PC disk image from a server farm (sort of like a "main frame" but running Windows Network server environments instead). The IT group manages all aspects of the Win Term environment down to screen resolutions and such.

Interesting.

Does MS charge sa,e for a win term as for a complete PC?

Not sure on the licensing but I would have to say that the manufacturer of the Win Term may have purchased a Embedded Windows license or it may be up to the IT dept of the company using them to manage the licensing. I never really got into that aspect of the PC world, just aware that they do exist and are being used.

With that said, any PC starting with the P4 BIOS actually HAS that capability built in. Basically with P4 BIOS there is a diskless boot sector built into the BIOS. Many PCs it is hidden so you don't see it on boot up but it is what is called Pxe (pixy) boot.

Set up a Pxe boot server on a network, create a PC "image" for the remote PC to boot into and set the PC BIOS to find the Pxe boot server.

Once found then the system board then executes the boot image... Once image has loaded it looks like any PC running Windows.. Still have to have a license for each workstation though since you would be booting to Windows OS.