RELEASE: Windows SteadyState 2.5

Posted by: kurtsh | June 17, 2008

RELEASE: Windows SteadyState 2.5

Have you ever wanted to be able to “reset” a bunch of machines to a pristine state without reimaging?
Have you ever wanted to “undo” all the changes & installations that a previous person made to a PC?
Have you ever wished you could lock down a PC –really easily- to prevent changes in the first place?

INTRODUCING WINDOWS STEADYSTATE 2.5!
First of all, this only works on Windows XP & Windows Vista. No Windows 2000 or 64-bit operating systems. It is however available in 20 localized versions for everything from English to French & Japanese.

SteadyState essentially does 3 things:

WORKSTATION LOCKDOWN
WORKSTATION RESET
CENTRAL MANAGEMENT or PER-WORKSTATION MANAGEMENT

For a demonstration, click here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/install/demo_player.swf

HOW DOES IT WORK?
Basically, the software moves the settings, system modifications, and profile information to special partition which is cleared the next time the computer is rebooted.

In fact, if you remotely reboot the workstation using something like SHUTDOWN.EXE, you essentially “remotely” reset the box to a pristine state eliminating all changes made to the box during the time in which is was used.

TESTING SOFTWARE WITH FULL ACCESS TO HARDWARE
Incidentally, besides providing an environment “safe for kiosking”, SteadyState also provides a good configuration for testing software in. A lot of software needs access to local hardware and can’t be run in virtual machines – things like check scanning devices or special identification peripherals. Imagine being able to test the installation of software on actual hardware – instead of virtual machines – and simply reset the machine once finished.

DOWNLOAD: (6.4MB)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=d077a52d-93e9-4b02-bd95-9d770ccdb431&displaylang=en&tm

WEB SITE:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/worldwide.mspx

NEWSGROUP:
http://forums.microsoft.com/windowstoolsandutilities/default.aspx?siteid=69

DOCUMENTATION: