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Altering the OS of your school provided laptop is probably not illegal, depending on what exactly you do. Unless you're unleashing a virus or destroying hardware, I really doubt anything will stick. I'm guessing this is the kind of thing the ACLU would help you with if you actually got in trouble.

Exactly. Unless you actually stole/damaged things--they'd be hard-pressed actually go through the trouble of ruining your life. It's this very fact that saved me back in the day.

Back when I was a senior in highschool (Class of '02), there was a computer-geek rebellion which I, by some strange twist of fate, found myself leading. It all started when the county bought some really nice computers for the fiber optic computer lab. Some of us got the bright idea to bring in cracked copies of Quake 2, Tribes 2, Unreal Tournament, and a bunch of other games to play during lulls in the classes. Most of the teachers didn't care. In fact, one of them even used "game time" as an incentive to get his lackadaisical senior students to do their assignments--with a lot of success I might add.

Then one of the hard-nosed teachers found out and made a habit of deleting the games. Of course, this was easily overcome by making copies of the game files locally and adding a few ifexist lines to the autoexec.bat of every machine to recreate the game should it be deleted. This worked for awhile until the county computer techs were called in to "See what was wrong."

Hoping to keep games off the computers, the county bought Clean Slate, a program used to lock down pre-XP computers. On the surface, the program seemed pretty tough. *All* changes/files created were removed every time the computer was restarted and only authorized programs were allowed to run. Of course, the BIOS was set as HD first to prevent bootdisking. The program was a huge hassle to both students and teachers alike.

This was first overcome by: 1) corrupting/resetting the BIOS 2)bootdisking in 3) REMing out the relevant lines in the autoexec and windows startup files. This entire process took approximately 20 seconds once you got good at it. And we did get good at it--there were over 300 computers in the school and every computer was unlocked (oftentimes the same day it was locked down). Unlocked computers were set with a blue background to indicate that they were fixed.

Eventually we wised up and just installed a keylogger on one of the computers scheduled to be locked down. Sure enough, you had to type in the password every time you installed the software. With the password (which worked throughout the school), many people actually used Clean Slate to protect the games from being deleted--which was just beautiful.

Figuring out what we were doing, they started to Norton Ghost the computers so that a direct install and password entry was not required. They also correctly configured Clean Slate so the BIOS couldn't be so easily corrupted. This too was eventually circumvented when we found out that Clean Slate is unable to apply its file protections to Novell Netware shared drives. If worse came to worse, and you had enough alone-time with the computer, you could always remove the case and reset the BIOS password with the pin.

Throughout this whole process, there was one rule among those involved: DO NOT DAMAGE THE COMPUTERS. Do not delete the Clean Slate files--only disable them. Do not put porn, ect. on the computers.

This turned out to be our saving grace. Eventually the computer technicians got fed up with our school. The network usage for our school was something like 30 times other schools in the county. Of course, all of this was occurring when the county was assuring the state that its computers would be ready for the new computer-based Standard of Learning (SOLs) tests. Bad timing. Entire meetings of the county school board were apparently based upon the

For reference, in case anyone else is interested, I found this alternative, also commercial: Clean Slate.

This really isn't a guarantee, though. Windows is inherently impossible to prevent users from performing certain actions; but the above software will certainly help. I reccommend Fortres if you want a standard Windows interface with restrictions, and WinU if you want to run only a single application. The Ontario Science Centre uses it (for their Internet Cafe), and it seems to work OK.

Thanks for the personal attack there, Jason. You're absolutely correct- I'm not a sysadmin at all. I can see you're bitter towards people you feel have it easier than you, but come on- you really don't know anything about me. I'm not going to defend myself to you, because this sort of personal debate is really just whining.

However, this is what default states are for. As one above user suggested, try Clean Slate. It'll essentially reset the hard drive whenever you tell it to.

Another option is to partition the drive, and only allow users access to one of them. Then, you can just wipe that one, while using the other one for the OS. You can keep a default registry, etc. so you can just replace the few things on the boot drive that the user CAN change.

I have used several other systems that use this sort of system, and they're MUCH better than the alternative. My college pays its IT people well, and we keep enough of them staffed so they rarely have to work overtime, except in the case of major emergencies.

In conclusion, don't act like all users are bad or ignorant. Just let them do what they want, and clean up after them. That's what a sysadmin is paid for: cleaning house. It's an honorable profession, and users appreciate a well-run system.

This kind of software causes a real headache for system admins.. I speak from personal experience. Our team of about 12 technicians look after approximately 1500 workstations, and about 2/3 of those are used by a theoretical maximum of about 6000 students on a weekly basis.

Trying to keep tabs on this kind of thing can be nigh on impossible.

We have found some software that does work pretty well though - a company called Fortres Grand sell a package for Win9x/Me/2k/XP called Clean Slate that basically resets the machine to a previous state every time it is rebooted. If you wish to add software, you disable it, and put it back on once the software is installed. The machine then works from that 'save point'.

We try not to make machines 'too tied down' for students (like blocking downloading, any changes at all) so this software is ideal and not too intrusive.

No, I dont work for Fortres Grand but thought it seemed appropriate to the subject! :)

Yes!!!! This is what the library I work at needs! No more lusers screwing up the system, no more Fortres not-so-"Grande," no more reformatting & reinstalling every other week...

Now if only the director weren't such a Windoze zealot, and one of those people who only *thinks* they understand computers... I'm in hot water for installing Mozilla and Open Office on the systems because some patron couldn't get their stupid pop-up e-greeting card to work! Grr....

If there is concern over fixing computers that might get broken, or worry about software being illegally installed, Fortres makes this neat package called Clean Slate. It lets you do whatever you want to the computer (ideal for a development environment) but instead of actually modifying any files, it transparently caches all changes made to the filesystem, and after a reboot the machine is restored to its initial state. We install this on lab computers at my school this year and it's really working out well. We have no problems with unknown programs and viruses getting stuck on machines and it gives students the freedom to change whatever they need to in order to get their job done (action-based restrictions and read-only files always got more in the way of doing real work). We also spend almost no time fixing software related problems since we can put them on a reboot schedule in the middle of the night.