Calling All Users of CDDVD Boot!

I’m one of the Program Managers working on the Windows Embedded team and am investigating the various deployment/boot scenarios that we would like to support moving forward.  CD boot is something that we released for XP Embedded to satisfy some of our customers in the Gaming and Medical industries who, at the time, were using it due to regulatory needs.  Other users also picked it up to create a more cost effective and stateless system.  However, today the Windows OS is larger and more complex, and supporting the same scenarios as XPe with respect to CD boot can prove to be technically challenging.  Also, with the proliferation of flash memory such as SD Cards, Compact Flash and USB keys, the scenarios supported by CD/DVD boot are now easily supportable using flash as the primary storage of the system.

That being said, I’m writing this post to gather more data about the use case scenarios for CD/DVD Boot that our customers are using today and if these scenarios would still be valid in a couple of years, or if we should spend more time developing technologies such as boot from USB, SD, Compact Flash, remote boot, etc..

MY ASK OF YOU: If you have any CD/DVD boot scenarios in your device development or are in the Gaming/Medical field I’d love to hear your feedback.  It’d also be great to know if you were using CD/DVD boot and migrated on to other technologies.

Also, if you have other comments or questions on our boot EEFs, feel free to shoot me a mail at wecrt@microsoft.com.

Thanks,

- Punit

Technorati Tags: XPe,embedded,CD boot