Non-Restrictive Technology for Computing Environments

For many IT Managers a simple way to manage public PCs is to use lockdown software. This avoids the arduous job of recovering and fixing these multi-user PCs. Lockdown software prevents access to sensitive Windows functions and restricts users from messing up the computers and prevents changes to these public access computers. There are many popular lockdown software packages available and they're often implemented on public access machines to make the IT administrator's job easier. Network staff can even lock down their workstations using Windows built-in Group Policies. The IT manager would like to avoid the constant trouble of having to rely on time-intensive back-up methods to reset these machines: reimagining or reinstalling Windows from scratch.

Lockdown software is an easy way of write-protecting the harddrive to prevent the shared computers from retaining changes made by the public users. This simple desktop security means restricts access to system utilities such as the DOS command line, the Registry Editor, and other sensitive Windows functions. This does make public PC management easier but also necessarily eliminates useful Windows functionality and severely constrains the users' productivity.

Locking down the public computers isn't often practical since IT managers often find themselves having to give users some, however small, access to the computer's resources such as internet browsing, file viewing, file saving, installing fonts, or printing permissions, and constantly having to extend these privileges on an ad hoc basis. The ideal solution would be to allow users to configure the machines to suit their needs, yet disallow any potentially damaging changes the public users may introduce to the machines.

There was a freeware utility called SteadyState offered by Microsoft that did just this, that is, until it was discontinued in 2010. But there is now another non-restrictive desktop protection freeware, the perfect alternative to Windows Steady State, that  does the same thing. It's called Reboot Restore Rx. Reboot Restore Rx locks in the administrator-defined configuration and allows users to make any changes they like to these multi-user systems during their sessions but discards all such changes once the user has ended her session, returning to the IT admin's pre-defined perfect system state.