Windows SteadyState 2.5
Windows® SteadyState™ 2.5 is now available on Windows XP and Windows Vista. Whether you manage computers in a school computer lab or an Internet café, a library, or even in your home, Windows SteadyState helps make it easy for you to keep your computers running the way you want them to, no matter who uses them.
Windows SteadyState runs on genuine copies of Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, and Windows Vista Starter. And, Windows SteadyState is offered free of charge to Windows Genuine Advantage customers!
Windows SteadyState Features Windows SteadyState includes the following features to help you manage your shared computers:
- Getting Started – Provides the initial steps to help you during your first time use of Windows SteadyState.
- Windows Disk Protection – Help protect the Windows partition, which contains the Windows operating system and other programs, from being modified without administrator approval.Windows SteadyState allows you to set Windows Disk Protection to remove all changes upon restart, to remove changes at a certain date and time, or to not remove changes at all. If you choose to use Windows Disk Protection to remove changes, any changes made by shared users when they are logged on to the computer are removed when the computer is restarted
- User Restrictions and Settings – The user restrictions and settings can help to enhance and simplify the user experience. Restrict user access to programs, settings, Start menu items, and options in Windows. You can also lock shared user accounts to prevent changes from being retained from one session to the next.
- User Account Manager – Create and delete user accounts. You can use Windows SteadyState to create user accounts on alternative drives that will retain user data and settings even when Windows Disk Protection is turned on. You can also import and export user settings from one computer to another—saving valuable time and resources.
- Computer Restrictions – Control security settings, privacy settings, and more, such as preventing users from creating and storing folders in drive C and from opening Microsoft Office documents from Internet Explorer®.
- Schedule Software Updates – Update your shared computer with the latest software and security updates when it is convenient for you and your shared users.
Get Windows SteadyState 2.5 now at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa...ang=en
HTH,
Tom
Thomas W Shinder, M.D., MCSE
Sr. Consultant / Technical Writer
Prowess Consulting www.prowessconsulting.com
PROWESS CONSULTING | Microsoft Forefront Security Specialist
Email: tshinder@isaserver.org
MVP — Forefront Edge Security (ISA/TMG/IAG)
John Says:
July 18th, 2009 at 7:11 am
Hello, my name is John, and i work for a Chicago area school district as a tech. We have ISA server 2004 and Surf-control for web filtering. We are imaging 100 new computers and using Microsoft Steady State 2.5 on these computers, and ghosting with Symantec Ghost Suite 2.5. Everything is going great except one thing. For simplicity given our small tech staff of 3 for 7 schools, we would like to keep these computers off the domain, and to login locally on these 100 computers. With steady state and ISA/surf control for web filtering, we see this as an ideal setup for us. We merely insert the ISA proxy in LAN settings and we are good to go, except one problem. Using steady state to lock-down an account on the local machine, every time we open an interent browser the prompt for ISA (user name & password) comes up. This is a problem because children will be using these computers in a lab setting for taking tests, so time is limited, and we dont want ISA prompts continually poping up. of course when we put in the user name & password, it saves it for that session in IE, but not for Safari 4 or Firefox 3.5 or other browsers, No matter, upon reboot or log-off, it once again asks for ISA authentication. And keep in mind that at this point we have not even enabled the “lock-down” C- drive feature of steayd state. The Administrato account that we also use to program steady state is able to access the internet without ISA prompts. The “admin” account (mentioned above) we created on the same local machine to use for Steady State login is also listed in the administrators group. So, my question is, what (Steady State or ISA) setting is causing the ISA prompt to appear on the local login on the local machine (off our domain, on the internal network) when trying to access the internet, and why will it not save the ISA user name & password in all browsers? Note* this happens even when we turn off all restrictions in Steady State. F.Y.I. Our network is currently configured to allow users (who bring their personal laptops in for example) to access the internet internally even without an authenticated login, but of course will not allow access to files on our network without authentication. Thanks in advance for any help you can give us. John JohnSartoriJr@gmail.com