Boot xp lan

[ECohen]

Hello,

I am a 5th grade teacher in Maryland who recieved a donation of 30 Dell latitude d610 laptops in great condition...except that none of them have harddrives (or power supplies). (Security issues made the donors remove the drives, I have no idea why no power supplies).

However, I can't afford to buy harddrives for the laptops until we have some fund raisers.

I was wondering if anyone knows if I could just boot to Windows XP on the laptops from a network drive instead of buying drives for each machine.

It seems like a great way to save energy and to make them lessor targets for theft. I plan to lock them to each student's desk.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. My tech skills are fairly strong, but if it was too complicated, I would wait.

 

[gtvr]

In general, boot from LAN seems to be usable for a remote install, but not running a PC, as far as "out of the box" configs.

There's some other technologies that may work, but I think you need an HD and some kind of OS on the client. Take a look at this thread, and some of the items they reference: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1082376.html

I bet you could find hard drives for 30-40 each, if you don't need a very large size.

 

[ECohen]

Thank you for your thoughts on this! Very much appreciated.

 

[davesworking]

A cost effective alternative might be to setup the computers to boot to flash drives, some off the shelf versions of Linux work this way.