Public terminal software
December 10, 2006 7:49 AM   Subscribe

Kinkos and other public internet terminals run software that restore the computer between log-ons. What software is this?

Does anyone have experience with this software? What are the requirements to set something like this up?
posted by MotorNeuron to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Faronics Deep Freeze is used frequently for this.
posted by bigmusic at 7:57 AM on December 10, 2006


Best answer: Deep Freeze, or the Shared Computer Toolkit, or Clean Slate, or GoBack.
posted by purephase at 8:12 AM on December 10, 2006


Previously on St. Elswhere: "Setting up an internet cafe" and "Image after every reboot"
posted by dgeiser13 at 8:57 AM on December 10, 2006


My school's computers exhibit this behavior, and I think it is related to an icon in the system tray called "Altiris Client Service".
posted by fvox13 at 10:35 AM on December 10, 2006


Altiris will "re-image" workstations on a scheduled basis. The client service utility maintains a connection to the deployment server and will listen for job settings/schedules.

Altiris also has a drive protection software package called Protect and, based on my own experience using it, it is not nearly as reliable as some of the others mentioned in this thread.

An interesting new product that they're developing is the Software Virtualization Solution which is supposedly developed alongside Protect.
posted by purephase at 12:13 PM on December 10, 2006


An alternative, incidentally, is to do what a university in Berlin did when I was there... they put six free web machines in a public area, free for anyone to use, so I did. After a few minutes, I thought to myself that the fonts used were slightly odd... and then it dawned on me that the machines were actually running Linux, with a Windows 'skin', and thus impervious to stupid people trying to download the latest virus. There was a start menu and everything; very cleverly done.

Alternatively, in reception at work we used to use a free kiosk program for Internet Explorer that effectively locked out users from anything other than the web (whether on a list you choose or not); and you could even get it to go back to your homepage after a period of inactivity. Very nice.
posted by jamescridland at 2:55 PM on December 10, 2006


YAPN (yet another product name): Driveshield
posted by bhance at 3:42 PM on December 10, 2006


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