The typical school lab: We want to update an image once a quarter or once a year, deploy it and have nothing change between quarters. In Microsoft Windows, there are about as many ways to go about this as there are IT guys. Some will use Altiris or something like that to reimage the machines every night. Others will use policies to lock everyone out of everything and trust that. But what if you don’t have a dedicated IT staff and honestly don’t really have the time to deal with it in a smaller lab environment. Well, introduce Microsoft’s Steady State (it’s actually been around for awhile, getting renamed every now and then). Steady State is a nifty little product that allows someone with little IT experience to load it onto Windows (yes, including Vista) and essentially freeze every machine to its current state. Each time the box gets rebooted after that it will go right back to the way things were.
But that’s not all Steady State does. It also has a nice management console for policies. There are far less policies than you would have, for example, in the local policy editor, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to set them. Best of all, Steady State is free and available for download here to run in your lab, hot spot, etc.
This might have sounded like a commercial for Microsoft. Not at all, Steady State doesn’t seem to work well in my Active Directory environment (we don’t need to change no stinkin’ computer passwords). If I’m using this in my virtual machines is that going to be a problem? Well, no, but it’s likely going to be a bit of overkill since you can just use snapshots. Since the machine goes back to the original state, what does that mean for your user data? Well, that needs to go on a jump drive or something… So overall, Steady State has a time and a place. It’s great for labs, internet cafes, hotels, kiosks and things like that where you have a shared host that will get messed up – and when it does, you won’t care about data, you’ll just want it back to the original “state” as quick as possible. If that’s what you’re after, this is great software for something freely available. Notsomuch otherwise.