Thin PC's or Incompatible PC's since Windows 8 and Windows 10 are sort of the nor these days. The problem usually centers around UEFI vs Legacy boot mode and eMMC driver support. This is a different approach.
One of the reasons a Thin PC is chosen is the low cost and that means cheap memory, eMMC.. and since that didn't standardize until late Windows 8.1 days there wasn't a common denominator to produce a common eMMC driver for boot or normal access.
However there have been LiveCD approaches since Make_PE3 and WinBuilder that booted XP or Win7 from Ramdisk space. Essentially eMMC isn't great for Read and Write cycles and really needs to be cared for by the Operating System or will prematurely burn-out. Windows XP and Windows 7 did not have a great TRIM command for supporting SSD and certainly didn't support eMMC at all. So booting from a ramdisk and "staying" in Ramdisk space will lengthen the life span of a eMMC boot device. Ram is designed for R/W and should last a normal lifespan.
Also there is the updates and virus angle to consider.. Updates are brutal on OS stability and long term they fragment and degenerate an OS until the entire Operating System has to be upgraded fresh.
Its the data that is transient and needs to be copied from one install to the next.
Viruses and malware may insert themselves into boot media and hdd images, but can only temporarily infect or corrupt data while a LiveCD is in memory.. upon reboot the virus or malware will be wiped clean.. and is the strategy of steady state, or powerwash pursued by Microsoft and Google at this time. In a portable device.. this reboot cycle can be quite often and narrow the window of time in which a virus or malware has in which to operate.. and if its airgapped.. narrow it to approximately zero.
Thus one alternative to booting off eMMC directly, is to use Linux grub to boot a LiveCD image of XP or Windows 7 into memory and run exclusively in RAM space and be unable to touch eMMC sd space.. effectively relegating the device into a power compute module which needs supplemental storage.. be that cloud or usb disk space.. which can be attached to after the LiveCD boot.
Turning a disadvantage into an advantage.. and also lessening the urgency of Updates.. until a stellar era in which virus and malware can infect near "instantaneously" upon joining the Net.
