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I am working in a university and we have some computer studios, in which some exams are done on computers (e.g. for working with office software, etc.). The exam obviously requires a clean system, so that no student may cheat or disrupt the exam. The current solution is to freshly install the complete studio the day before the exam and re-install the normal image the day after. That work is tedious and time-consuming, even with our PXE images.

I am searching for a way to use PXE to boot into a live-image of Windows XP or Windows 7. Our workstations are equipped with 2GB of RAM.

Does anyone have some insight on this problem and/or done this before?

Alternatively, a solution which involves booting a Linux terminal server client (e.g. LTSP) via PXE without touching the local hard drive would also be okay, as we may then run the windows image on a terminal server.

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Why not just pick up a copy of Deep Freeze and prevent any local changes? – Zoredache Nov 23 '11 at 3:41
nice product, but conflicts with several of our existing management solutions. We just need the temporary environment. – Lars Nov 23 '11 at 10:27
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WinPE from the Windows AIK can be PXE booted. You can add a reasonably number of applications to the image, but it's far from a guarantee that any program will run on it.

A Windows 7 could technically be edited to fit into a PXE bootable image, Windows has no qualms with using ramdisks for it's C: drive. However a normal install of Win7 will simply take too much space.

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so far, I've only used WinPE in installation environments instead of running it as a live Windows. Can you point me to documents handling this particular setup? – Lars Nov 22 '11 at 21:27
Try this link – Cold T Dec 12 '11 at 17:00
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