- Posted on
Sun Dec 31, 2017 10:43 am
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vitaprimo
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- Posts: 37
- Joined: Jul 12, 2016
- Location: La Paz, Baja California Sur. MX.
I bought a handful of thin clients to be used just like this. The model I got is the HP t5740, it runs Windows Embedded 2009 and has special HP software that lets you customize what launches at start up, one of this options is to open a browser, IE, full screen and logout or restart if the browser is somehow circumvented (read closed.) Being an old version of IE it'll have problems displaying Control Pages, but, you can set the thin client to do what's meant to do: RDP into a server fast and modern enough to manage what's displayed, like a vSphere-hosted virtual machine.
A used thin client is about USD20-40 on eBay, you really don't want to buy these devices new because they're very underpowered and very expensive, this is because of the management software they include, like the HP one I mentioned before; used though, with a little ventilation you can throw them into a cabinet and forget about them forever, they are most of the time passively cooled so they're silent.
You'll also need the drivers for the display and possibly an most likely a USB cable. I also have done this with Intel Compute Sticks and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB, you'll need to sign up as a developer on the Microsoft website and you will need to learn how to deploy Windows Images but it's free, it's just very time consuming to learn the stuff. This version of Windows can work in Kiosk mode, either setting it up locally or through group policy in an Active Directory domain. For that you'll need Windows Server, you can get cheap licenses on eBay or download a trial from Microsoft, the image will still be needed if you get a license as it is the same. Once you start dealing with servers virtualization is a must, VMware is freeish--it quickly starts to get expensive and Windows includes Hyper-V for free but it's sort of a PITA specially if you come from the Mac world. If you're running a Pro-and-up version of Windows already, it'll be able to join a domain and through GPOs in Active Directory you can deeply customize it to get what you want--it takes patience though.
Good luck!
Last edited by
vitaprimo on Sun Dec 31, 2017 10:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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