XP Embedded Experimentation

[SMurf]

Hello,

I thought I'd fill you all in on what I've been doing with my 560X, in case there's any interested parties thinking of doing the same.

Although the 560X isn't modern (10 years old this year I believe), it still has enough poke and features to make for a quick and easy little Internet terminal. To that end, I have removed the stock 4GB hard disk and replaced it with a 2GB CompactFlash card and adapter. Now the system is completely silent.

But as CF cards are limited by the number of writes that can occur, what operating system to use? XP Home or Pro by default consume around 2GB, so that's not an option if you also want to host some applications. But there is a new option by way of XP Embedded, a componentized version of XP Pro that allows you to configure exactly what is installed.

Using the Target Designer is a daunting task. It feels much like compiling your own Linux kernel, with a myriad of options and very little help. But after four trial runs I now have a silent system that boots to the standard Explorer desktop, uses my wireless card to connect to my router and allows me to view web pages and read my e-mail.

Granted, with only 233 MHz of processing power, the full 96MB of installable memory (so IBM says) and no pagefile it's not the best of ideas but hey, I can play MP3s!

Anyone else tried this?

[Stargate199]

That's cool, but may I inquire where you got your copy of XP Embedded. I have only used it at kiosks and that type of thing and for some reason those things always seem to crash on me when I use them.

[SMurf]

It's just the evaluation version, you can download it from Microsoft.

The reason why it crashes is probably because it can be tricky working out exactly what a range of programs need, the "hard dependencies" are only between Windows components. Plus if it's working quite close to the wire as far as memory limits go then an allocation failure that isn't handled properly will cause a crash.

But aside from those issues it's pretty good.