Does anyone have a reccomendation for a good piece of software to freeze the drive on Windows XP computers. This would be for a small university on computer lab systems. Basically we want something that we can lock out changes to the hard drive with while allowing our ITs to easily unlock the systems remotely to allow system updates to occur. Anyone have any ideas?
Yeah, the built in group policy was what I was thinking also. Or are you trying to encrypt the contents of the drive to prevent access from a Live CD or something?
Windows Steady State has a Drive Protection program (works similar to DF). It's Free. Works with GPOs. Can't cleanly be remotely managed. You can switch drive protection off by remotely running a command, which isn't pretty. Faronics Deep Freeze, which I've used extensively, isn't free. Works with GPOs during a thawed period. Has a console app that be used to remotely thaw/freeze each PC. Can schedule a thaw period for Windows Updates and Virus .dat's. I've looked into Steady State as a replacement for Deep Freeze, and it isn't logical for nearly 500 computer lab PCs. Instead, I'm developing a set of GPO's and mandatory profiles that should do the trick. For you, it's a numbers and money game. If you have 10 PC's and no need to remotely manage them, I'd go Steady State. GPO's just don't stop everything. I'm a fan of HDD lockdown. Also, I'd be pretty sure I had a good image of each machine. I can list you quite a bit of free/open-source software to get that image automated and hardware independent.
Something like Deep Freeze is something that we need. We have used deep freeze in the past but it is an older unsupported version. So Deep Freeze is an option for the future. Is there anything similar to Deep Freeze by a competitor vendor that would also be good?
