I'm looking at building a Win7 based RDP OS for an old PC with 512MB RAM. It's currently running XP Portable for that purpose but is having some issues with freezing and there's been some improvements to the RDP client in Win7 which might be useful (the server is running Win7 x64 Ultimate)
As it's only being used for RDP and occasionally running Opera or Iron Portable to play online videos that don't currently work over RDP (although they might using Win7 instead of XP), I don't really want to use a full bloated Win7 install so have been looking at Win7PESE, which is OK but I'd prefer to be able to make settings stick, so that PeNetwork doesn't have to run at each boot to setup the Network, hardware doesn't have to be detected and Visual and mouse/keyboard settings can be set.
I'm also not sure if it's advisable to use an unpatched Win7PE as the Host, even though it's mostly only being used as a RDP station, in case that leaves it vulnerable as an attack vector into the network. I certainly need to use the RDP patches at least.
I did look at Windows7 Embedded a while back but got a bit lost working out how to build it so if that would be suitable, maybe there's a guide someone could point me to that might help. Maybe Win7 ThinPC would be a possibility but it seems that has to be installed on the intended system and as that's not where I am, it's perhaps easier to use something I can build into an ISO/VHD here to then take there and boot with grub4dos. The system also only has a small (20GB) HDD which doesn't have much free space anyway, so it's tricky to install an OS on the system. I've got a 16GB CF card I could use but I'm not sure if Win7 will install to that, although it will probably be able to boot an ISO/VHD from it (Linux boots and runs fine from it but XP freezes unless I hide it with grub4dos before booting and if I unhide it after XP Portable has booted, it locks up straight away!)