Complete Crash-Proofing Toolkit for Student PCs
Are you looking for ways to save money, streamline operations, and do more with less?
Do your students constantly have to wait for the school lab computer to respond? Do you find your machines gradually taking longer and longer to start-up? Do the PCs take forever to shutdown? Is there a lot of clutter on these workstations?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get these student terminals to run like you just freshly installed Windows? What if you could lock-in the perfect system state so that the machines continually return to this perfect system state on every reboot!
If your school IT department is like most help desks, you spend a lot of your time fixing these sorts of PC-related issues. Maintaining your PCs is a stress-filled undertaking and probably takes up a ton of man hours that could be better spent on other more important IT tasks.
Traditional Reset Options
Most schools typically use imaging technology to occasionally return these PCs to a clean system state. But between new re-imaged Windows install the students still have to put up with the mess other students put on the machines and all the related unwanted changes. It’s also a time-intensive process to keep the images up-to-date with the latest Windows updates, program patches, and the most recent anti-virus definitions, and so forth.
Another option is to lockdown the student PCs. That is, restricting the students’ account access privileges to prevent them from changing anything on the PCs. While this does reduce your workload and presents a clean and consistent Windows configuration for each student on each session, it does also necessarily limit the usefulness of the machines. For instance, if a student needed to install a special font for a project you would have to install it for them or you’ll be limiting the usefulness of the machines and severely curtailing the student’s productivity. The students won’t let you know; they’ll just think that their computer-related work needs to be done at home.
Auto-Reset Software
Having an auto-reset software installed will keep you on task, it optimizes your time so you’re not unnecessarily running around putting out fires, that is, trying to figure out how to undo all the various things students do on your PCs. Stop wasting your time responding to support tickets related to routine PC resets. Auto-reset software gives the public users the illusion that they’re manipulating a live system. They’re free to hack the registry, download viruses, install games, surf wherever they please, put files on the desktop, change the background, and so forth. When the students have ended their session all such changes are discarded and the clutter will be gone. This provides a much richer experience on the shared computers.
Drive Vaccine: Your PC Auto-Cleanup Toolkit
In a nutshell, here’s what we offer: We reduce the process of rebuilding PCs down to seconds. With Drive Vaccine you can set the machines to continually return to your predefined perfect system state. This way all your machines are always available and your technicians are free to do more important tasks.
You define the optimal system state (called the “baseline”) and once one user’s session has ended the machine reboots that baseline state for the next public user. You can also define how the auto-reset between each user’s session will be triggered: On every restart, logoff, on some fixed schedule, or only when the machine goes idle. This would also ensure a consistent setup on all the network’s machines.
Drive Vaccine simplifies IT management by keeping the public PCs optimally and consistently configured and easily recoverable from any software corruption from accidentally deleted files, malware infections, the Blue Screen of Death, on up to issues that cause Windows to no longer boot. There is nothing the students can do on the machine — if it’s any sort of software corruption introduced on the machines and not physical damage — that Drive Vaccine can’t recover from. And since Drive Vaccine is a non-restrictive auto-reset software, it doesn’t limit the users’ abilities to access any Windows features. Drive Vaccine will return the machines to your predefined configuration once they’re done, discarding unwanted user changes: including erased files, installed software, acquired spyware and adware, downloaded viruses and Trojan horses, altered icons, and even complete Windows system failures.
Streamline Your IT Operations
Drive Vaccine also allows you to automatically power-down all your machines after a defined period of inactivity. It takes only a few seconds to automate all your Drive Vaccine client machines to auto-shutdown after a specified period of inactivity. You can also schedule the Wake-on-LAN feature of the Drive Vaccine RMC to have the machines bootup each morning when school starts.
Baseline Updates Are a Breeze
Drive Vaccine prevents unwanted changes yet allows the retention of desired changes. Obviously, the set restore point needs to be constantly moved forward to incorporate Windows and program updates. Drive Vaccine makes baseline updates, that is, scheduling these maintenance periods which allow updates and patches to be pushed out to workstations easy.
You can avoid altogether the crapshot of new Windows and program updates by trialing them before pushing them out to all your network PCs with Drive Vaccine. If you update your baseline (the reset point that the systems continually return to) and find an issue with these updates you can always go back to an earlier baseline. Drive Vaccine also lets you exclude files and folders from the restore-to-baseline for any data you would like to remain persistent such as roaming profiles so that student profile data can be retained.