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75+ Users on a single Win XP Laptop

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8 replies

by thomas.peterson

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Hi,

I'm currently trying to solve an interesting problem regarding Windows XP Professional SP2.

Requirements:
- Platform must be a laptop w/ RJ45, wifi & USB
- OS must be Windows XP Pro SP2
- Each user must have individual login
- Each sign-in must be able to be logged/audited
- Each session must be tightly controlled via profile
- Logins must be successful while docked, undocked or wireless

In plain English: Our requirement is to have a laptop available to upwards of 700 employees who may or may not ever even use it. However, it must be able to support them even if they use it once.

My research informs me that there is a 75 user limited set with WinXP Pro.

I am coming to the community for ideas and suggestions or tools to help figure out how to make this work. I will try to respond to your questions and or feedback as quickly as possible.

Thanks in advance!

Thomas

8 replies

by the scummy one

in which case, you dont need to install everybody on it all at once.

On my loaners, I put 1 local account, 1 network account, and the admin account is the same (recorded).
I set it up fully with the domain account.
Then AS NEEDED, I run updates or add a user account to it. Why add every user to it that may or may not use it???

by rahouseholder

Everything I can find states that you are only limited by the size of your hard drive. Each account creates a profile which will quickly fill up most laptop drives. My profile on my PC is 349 MB. I do have files in my documents folder also. I believe a "fresh" profile with no extra files is still around 4 MB so you can see that it wont take long for the drive to fill up.

by wesley.chin

What is the extent and kind of the logging/auditing that is called for?

by thomas.peterson

Ok, so the laptop is more of a 'tool' that is on a shared workbench.

The logging requirements are for regulatory reasons, to track connections, authentications for secondary systems etc.

One of the ideas that was floated included using USB tokens for login, but those are prone to being lost, dropped, stolen and may pose problems in sensitive environments.

I hope this helps, thanks for your participation!

by rob miners

this Notebook connecting to Thomas. Do you have Internet access. Is it on a Network and connected to a Domain. What exactly is it being used for.

Rob

by thomas.peterson

...is that it may be on a Windows domain, maybe managed by a third party, and may or may not have internet access.

My primary goal is that users can be pre-loaded or managed via group policy and that group could be as big as several hundred.

Some more thoughts regarding local authentication I had were fingerprint scanner, usb fob, etc. But if what I am hearing is that the volume of user accounts is limited only by disk space then that will be the answer. I could probably just recommend a 320GB HD rather than a 40GB HD and be done with it.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks again.

by rob miners

say is that I am glad that its not me having to create them. I can't see that you would be limited to 75 users either. Have you allocated 4GB per Profile. That will suffice if the Users are not saving anything to My Documents. But if they are you could end up in strife. It also hinges on the size of the Hard Drive that will fit the Notebook. You may want to have a look at SteadyState for a bit more control.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6761038

Then on the other hand if something goes wrong with the Notebook like Hard Drive failure you will have wasted a lot of effort unless you have a Backup Image of the Drive.

If you do have access to a Domain it would be a lot simpler and you would have the User Accounts on the File Server. Then you could use the Domain Group Policy to lock it down.

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