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Restore training room PCs

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by epait

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Hi,

I work as a IT contractor for the EPA and we constantly get caught messing around with PCs in our training rooms (EPA employees are trained on (Excel,Word and other software). Sometimes we let third party people use or traing rooms to install non standard software and teach a class outside of our regular trainers. We end up with PCs that have alot of stuff, registry settings changed etc. I tested DEEPFreeze...but sometimes classes will last for a few days for a 3rd party and they sometimes change the schedule so when they were rebooted their software and changes went away. We have thought of creating another partition, virtual enviroment or possible use XP system restore point. If anyone can suggest something...it would really help out! We have tried Ghost but it is too time consuming. We have 13 PCs in 2 training rooms so we have to be able to recovery fast. There are breaks sometimes but other times the rooms are being used all week all day. If anyone has pros or cons of using XP system restore point...please let me know.

thanks,

6 replies

by robo_dev

That's what some colleges use.

XP restore point works pretty well.

by mjd420nova

I use two different approaches to these annoying problems. One is to keep a backup program ready to replace the entire drives contents, it's much easier to just wipe the drive and load the backup. The other is the drive caddy method, we've installed removable drives on these machines and can swap them out to get back to a fixed set of programs to be used for each course. This does however require that they get cleaned up too after being run through a course but makes for quick switches when needed.

by john.keady

Most of the time when I worked in a college it department we used deepfreeze. But since it might be rebooted that isn't the best option. You might try an Acronis boot cd. I have made images of each computer in our "test" classroom. It makes a hidden partition of the hard drive and makes an image of the computer there. It has an option to restore it by pressing the f11 button on bootup and asks if you really want to restore. On our old dell gx110's it would take about 3 to 5 minutes to restore the computers.

by churdoo

Virtual PC or VMWare workstation.

Set up Virtual PC or VMWare workstation disk files, and always run classes from the Virtual disk files and not from the host O/S. When time to start a new class, copy the original disk file over the used one. When a 3rd party wants to use the room, copy a virgin disk file for their use and maintain that disk file throughout their class. When done, delete their disk file. Depending on the local hard drive size of the training PC's you can likely store multiple virtual disk files on each PC, so schedule changes are not a problem as you simply have each class use their virtual disk file.

by computercookie

I'd be inclined to setup one lab with "SteadyState" not tried it however did a lot of work with "Shared Toolkit", sick of five year olds opening up dll's in notepad.

It's free and locks down everything you want and more, and always reloads the image. You could set it up as a workgroup if that's possible, if you use a domain that requires a certain amount of administration, and a lot more in setup.

For the other lab I would definitely use the the drive caddy as previously suggested, and only allow that lab to be used by externals, the reason being is that how much control do you have over the externals and the software that they install!

Most of these people wouldn't give a damn whether or not they actually had the right to install the software on external computers, hence it would be desirable to re-image the disks.

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