Can Windows be booted from the network?

Question

If not, can put most of the system be ran from network drive?

Answer 1

There are several free programs out there that will allow you to wake up a computer over the LAN, but your system board and/or NIC must support WOL.  This is the one I use, it's simple and it works

http://www.download32.com/wol-i27756.htm...

Answer 2

Simple answer: Yes, but you probably can't afford it.  To boot windows off a network, you need very high end Storage Area Network equipment, and special network cards in your servers.  Other operating systems seem to work rather well booting off the network, such as DOS, or Linux.  There is also a "slimmed" down version of windows called WinPE that is designed to be booted from the network, but it does not run many applications, and doesn't support nearly as much hardware as the full windows.