It's not clear to me whether you plan to run a legacy Windows OS directly or virtualize, but I'm running pfSense on this (Windows with VirtualBox, VMWare, etc. would install fine, of course):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KM7YY4Y?psc=1

It's been running for 2 years nearly nonstop. Networking galore, no noise (the entire case is a heatsink), and power efficient. I'm sure you can find something newer and more exacting to your requirements.

Interesting! I think whatever solves the problem at low power consumption is ideal - right now my cloud VPSes are pretty expensive and I need to figure out a better option. Thanks for the recommendation. Are you running a BBS? If yes, care to share the telnet address? Cheers.

Raspberry Pi? Probably hard to get lower power than that. Though being an ARM processor and running Linux you'd have to use an emulator - probably still faster than a real early 90s PC though.

I'm doing this exactly on an HP thin client https://support.hp.com/nz-en/document/c01567702

I have changed the storage to a modern DOM to be able to accommodate windows XP and scheduled a restart every midnight to perform the necessary BBS maintenance activities and have this non-server OS do a restart. During the past 10 years only one has died. I understand the need for a Windows OS that can still run 16bit applications if you don't want to add an additional layer of virtualization.

One option could be to buy an old netbook for that. They cost sometimes single-digit euros/dollars only, yet are very capable up to windows xp and depends on model, even windows 7. And as a bonus, you get an UPS with it, if the battery still holds anything. 😀
For configuration and everything, you have "built-in" keyboard and screen, yet it all takes very little space.

Sounds like a job for a tillamook.

Those things ran so cool you could almost nearly not use a heatsink.

cloverskull wrote on 2022-06-01, 04:55:

Interesting! I think whatever solves the problem at low power consumption is ideal - right now my cloud VPSes are pretty expensive and I need to figure out a better option. Thanks for the recommendation. Are you running a BBS? If yes, care to share the telnet address? Cheers.

My setup is a firewall/IDS only.