Most pcs that are old enough to make use of this won't boot from USB anyway, and what on earth is wrong with booting them from a live linux CD to achieve the same thing at a fraction of the price...

A "non-product" invented to fill a non-existant gap in a vapourware market by the looks of things...

Why not just dump the windows bit altogether and run linux on your old hardware, scrap the anti-virus, scrap the windows licenses and get another 5 years out of your hardware... and not a usb stick in sight...

Another vote for Thinstation!

I've converted 150 aging Dells to terminal server clients in our call center with Thinstation. I yanked all the hard drives and left 128MB-256MB of RAM in each. PXE-Etherbooting works great!

If you tally up the advantages for a corporation or any other organization to migrate to a thin client system:

- Price (very low per seat, or free)

- Cost of administration (limited to minimal maintenance on the server + hardware maintenance on user stations). No virus scanning of thousands of individually-vulnerable hard drives. Virtually no virus risks to the server(s).

- Cost of entire system - can be equal to the cost of the hardware.

- Cost of productivity software - usually very low-cost or free (OpenOffice or Lotus office suite, open-source collaboration software, open-source media and photo editing, and so on).

- Speed of repairs of user stations - involve repair or replacement of hardware only.

- Data backup - limited to backing up server...no more imaging fat-client user stations, or trying to recover data off of fat clients which have been ravaged by viruses or hard disk failure.

These advantages make a "fat-client" Windows-based network look like an anachronism (at least in "smart" IT networks). Just ad a cheap, very low-capacity SSD to existing user stations (or continue to use a fraction of the existing HD, as you choose) and away you go.

No, I do not think that Microsoft is going to make the money it thinks it will on Windows 7 (as more and more home, educational, and business users are starting to load Linux for their "fat-client" needs as well).

You cant beat NComputings $70 offering on Linux OR Windows.

This article is like one big ad. Is it a purchased and paid for write-up?

... for a lot less than £25 per seat.

Have a look at http://www.thinstation.org/ which we used to convert 10+ ageing Dells in our warehouse to thin-clients. Quite happily PXE boots and all that jazz for £0.

Or... you could use LTSP 5 which is built into many distros these days such as Ubuntu (and I believe Fedora). Not only do you not need to pay for a 'license' it can be configured to boot over the network (with a network card that supports PXE) or from Floppy/CD/Hard Drive/Flash/USB stick etc and it can also connect to Windows servers. All for free.

So really if you ask me, it sounds like these folks are just selling on an existing technology bundled on a USB stick and charging £25 for the privilege.

Rob