Windows ThinPC - how do you set up to work as a thin client?

[R.O.S.S.I]

Hi all, just wondering if anyone has any experience of using Windows Thin PC at all?

Ive installed it onto a test machine at work but im having a difficult time making it act in the same way a thin client would, i.e. when the machine is turned on it auto loads up an RDP connection and takes them to a log on screen.

Ive had a look online and can't find anything really about it - would be good to get this sorted as would save us buying in thin clients as we've got 10 or so old machines that would be perfect to act as thin clients.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

What do you mean?

I've done the simple things like create an RDP file and place it in the start up folder, delete all desktop icons bar an RDP icon, auto hide the taskbar, remove 99% of things from the Start Menu so it's blank but I was just wondering if there was an easier way to do this or if there is some in built tool i'm missing that can set it up in this way, as I'd ideally like to roll it out to a lot of machines.

Things like making it so users can't accidently minimize their RDP window aswell would be handy.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

I set this up at work, using group policy preferences to do all the reg hacking etc for me, so I can drop a domain machine into the right group and turn in into a thin client.

I seem to recall I have it set up to auto log in as a local account on that machine, which is pretty locked down (no access to task manager etc), Then Instead of the normal windows explorer.exe shell it starts a third party program that can launch a program via parameters and keep it open (disables alt-f4 etc, auto relaunches if it's closed or crashes) this launches MSTSC.exe with a saved .RDP file (copied over from a network drive on boot so I can update it) The .RDP file is customised so it launches full screen with no control bar.
End result is you turn it on and it opens the RDP window straight up and the user logs on to the terminal server. Once they disconnect the third party app reopens the rdp file and the next person can log in.

Edit: think the third part prog was called Shelly

Hi Zarf, don't suppose you could help me out or point me in the right direction to what GP's I need to set etc and how to get it set up?

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

I've made a bit of progress.

I've got it to autologin by specifying some registry settings in GP, and I've also managed to get it load MSTSC as the shell rather than Explorer (again through group policy) but I'm trying to figure out a way of getting it to load a custom RDP file with predefined settings etc rather than the standard MSTSC instance, but i'm having a bit of trouble doing that.

I found a VBS script which I thought might do it but it doesn't seem to be playing ball.

Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
shell.Run "mstsc.exe /multimon C:\EB.rdp", 1, true
shell.Run "logoff"

C:\EB.rdp being the custom RDP file I'd created. (would it be possible to have that read from a network location?)
Also does the mstsc.exe need to be a full path like "%windir%/system32/mstsc.exe...." or is just mstsc.exe OK?

I stored the script in a network share and pointed the GP to it but it didn't seem to play ball.
I can get the MSTSC client to load up as the shell fine when I just specify the MSTSC path in the group policy instead of the VBS script.

Does anyone know if the Custom User Interface group policy will read a VBS script file? Does the VBS script look correct?

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

Can't you just set the path to "mstsc.exe [path to rdp file]"?

Yeh, I tried that yesterday and it worked fine! haha.