My first go at it took almost 7 hours, but now I can build a deployable image in under 3 hours. You do get 10 years of service and support from Microsoft.
If you want to run it for longer than 120 days you have to shell out just shy of $1000 for the dev tools, and $90 for each install you do with your custom image. I have my custom image on a 5 year old laptop with an Athlon 2600+ and 512MB RAM – and it has (here is the best part) 6.5 hours of battery life! Now, that’s amazing given that at the time it was quoted at 4 hours at best.Īre there any disadvantages to this, the magical componentized version of XP? Well, yes, actually.
It can run comfortably on a Pentium Pro with 64MB of RAM, and still function as a desktop OS (just slowly, but not as slow as you think). Due to its smaller footprint and less junk that comes with it (or no junk, it’s up to you), it requires minimal specs and power to run.
Once you install the software packages on your Windows machine and build your image you can deploy it to whatever machine you want.
Convert unique drivers and applications into components for use in a custom operating system image.
The Component Designer: Here you define custom components to use in embedded runtime images. Also includes intuitive drag-and-drop user interface of selected features and automated dependency-checking and issues list.
The Component dependency checking – Create a bootable runtime image for a specific target device.Īdvanced component browsing – Easily find desirable features using multiple tree views and customizable filters. The Footprint Estimator Tool – Calculate the impact that adding certain components and component dependencies will have on the footprint of a runtime image. The Target Designer: The Target Designer Helps you build, develop, and customize embedded runtime images, with the ability to save the configuration as XML data. This is good as you want to make sure it’s going to work on your machine after all, even if you don’t throw everything into the build, it’s going to be a large first download. Automates hardware-specific data to produce runtime images tailored to your target hardware. The Target Analyzer: The Target Analyzer verifies your runtime image will support your chosen hardware by probing the target device hardware and analyzing its content. There are a few tools you are going to need to use to pull this off. Once you have downloaded and installed the package, you’re going to want to look here. But before you get carried away, here’s the how-to for getting this thing started. So, how do you get this componentized super version of XP? The starter kit will give you a 120 day trial of the software build tools and the OS it can create. So here’s the best question, “Why would I go through the extra work of building my OS via componentizing it?” That’s simple you only install what is needed (who needs 8 million print drivers in their default install anyway?), and you can have a fully functional desktop OS with an install footprint of 200MB or less (that’s with most of the bells and whistles you would need to game, or use the machine as a desktop). It also comes with a snazzy new theme that I think is just great. NET 3.5, Sliverlight, RDP 6.1, IE7, Windows Media player 11, DirectX 9, and many other features (it can also be run as a real time OS via 3rd party products, but I don’t recommend it). Depending on how you want it set up it can include. It has all the latest and greatest features of XP and its software available on a componentized level. Windows Embedded Standard 2009 is a componentized and updated version of Windows XP Pro. Let’s start with Windows Embedded Standard 2009, formerly XP Embedded. Let’s look at a few products that don’t exactly get much attention in the consumer lime light. But what if you could get a smaller footprint, way better battery life than Vista or XP (think days, not hours), and everything else your little heart desires already? You can, and even better, you have been able to for a while. The future of Windows is clearly Windows 7.