Non Restrictive Technology for Computing Environments

For many IT Managers a simple means of maintaining public access is to use lockdown software. This prevents the tedious task of recovering and fixing these multi-user PCs. Lockdown software is intended to restrict access to sensitive Windows functions and to prevent public users from tampering with and preventing changes to these public access computers. There are many popular Lockdown Software packages available and they're often deployed on public access machines to make the IT administrator's job easier. Network staff can even lock down their workstations using Windows group policies. Reasonably enough, the IT manager would like to avoid the constant hassle of having to rely on traditional back-up methods to reset these machines: reimagining or reinstalling Windows from scratch.

Lockdown software is a simple way of write-protecting the harddrive to prevent all public user changes from being made to the shared computing resources. This desktop security measure restricts access to system utilities such as the DOS command line interface, the Registry Editor, or other sensitive functions. This does make public PC management easier but also necessarily eliminates useful Windows functionality and 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 privileges. The ideal solution would allow users to configure the machines to suit their tastes and needs, yet disallow or automatically undo any potentially damaging changes the public users may have introduced 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 that’s 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 they've ended their session, returning to the IT admin's pre-defined perfect system state.