Where to start?

Thanks for reading this.  We are a MAR in Latrobe PA.  We have placed computers into the community rooms of the local govt subsidized apartment complexes so that everyone has access to the internet.  We provide the computers and the local govt provides the internet access.

I have tried to keep the system simple but our machines are going down evey two months.  I run Spybot and Glary.  I am now trying AVG.  I thought that when I switched the machines out and put in some better machines with XP the system restore would solve all the worlds problems and a few quick mouse strokes would restore everything.  That assumes that the computer even starts.

I am no computer security expert.  I am finally working to password protect the Administrators rights and I thought that if I made eveyone sign in as a Guest it would be difficult for someone to change settings or highjack the machine.  But from what I can see the Guest priviliges are too vague to help me.

Can someone recommend a combination of Windows user settings and other software that can stop people from making changes in the operating system?  We'd like to let people surf the internet but still have the system the way I built it when they are done.

I'd like to thank you in advance for any help on this subject 

Paul in LAtrobe

Hello Paul, that sounds pretty frustrating.  It sounds like you could use Windows Steady State.  It is a free package from Microsoft that locks down the computers.  If a user somehow messes things up, it will return to the way you want it by just rebooting the computer.  Hope this helps.

Best of luck,

Gary

I second Gary's vote for Windows Steady State.

I agree with the other folks who recommended SteadyState but also wanted to point you to a variety of resources on working with public access computers from TechSoup and our TechSoup for Libraries site.  One of our tech analysts, Kevin Lo, wrote an article on this exact topic not long ago. You can find it here: http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/ctc/page5203.cfm and see his overview of different tools and considerations for setting policies for a public lab. We have a section of articles written for community technology centers here: http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/ctc/index.cfm 

Since most libraries also have public access computers, many use disk security programs like Windows Steady State, Clean Slate, or Deep Freeze to reset the machines in between users and ensure basic security standards. Even though you're not in a library, I imagine a lot of the same issues are relevant to your community lab.

Here's a blog post examining SteadyState in detail and also includes links to the other utilities and applications beyond what I mentioned above. They have a variety of short, easy-to-digest articles that are organized as "cookbooks" with tips for standardizing public computers, ensuring security, restoring and backing up, time-management/reservation software (to give users specific amounts of time on a public machine at a time), etc.

Hope it's helpful! And thanks for the work you're doing to bridge the digital divide.

Has anyone come across a "Dummies guide" to emulating Steady State through Group Policy for computers attached to a Domain?  I seem to get lost after launch the gp console, (also attempting this on a SBS 2003 server as opposed to plain server)

Dave

Hey Dave, I haven't found a "dummies guide" for group policy.  I was able to find this tutorial, though.  I am self-taught in the workings of it.  There are many lockdowns that you can do via group policy.  We play with some web settings, firewall settings, and some control panel access.  I haven't any experience with SBS, just Server 2003 standard.