Will Policy Pak replace MS Steady State?

[edarr]

We have both enterprise PC's on a Domain and PC's accessed by public users, in a workgroup. We formerly used MS Steady State, to lock down the settings and prevent any users from making changes to these PC's, that are in the Workgroup environment. Steady State is not supported on Windows 7.

Can we use Policy Pak, in a Workgroup environment, to lock down such items as access to the C:\ drive, like we used to with Steady State?

Thank you,

Ed

[jeremym]

We don't like to think of PP as a SS replacement.

Tools like SteadyState, of which .. many are available.. like the (for pay) DeepFreeze or the (for free) Wioski.com are good replacements.

Let's call that category of tool - a "Reboot to wipe" tool.

Reboot to wipe tools will snap back the machine to whatever you had it at when "frozen" -- after a reboot.

In contrast, PP's job is to continually re-enforce specific application settings ... whenever needed. There's so many times you want the application settings to be continually reenforced, though... A user changes some Firefox or IE setting .. and you just want it to go back instantly when the app is re-run. That's PP.

But we don't "freeze" the whole system down like "wipe to reboot" tools do.

PP is about applications, where those tools are more about the system itself.

We're a GREAT better together story.. Restoring the whole PC at reboot.. but WHILE the machine is running, consistently reenforce settings using PP.

Hope that clarifies.