I recently rolled out 4 checkin stations for our Daycare, which will be used for checkin and checkout 5 days a week for about 350 children.  Two of these are also being used for Childrens checkin for their weekend service time and the other two will be used for the preschool area at the same time on the weekends.  These will also be eventually used on Wednesday nights for the Student Ministry.  As these computers will be on most days all day in open areas that everyone has easy access to it was important to me to be able to easily secure these computers and make sure that no matter what happens that the next time they are turned on they’ll ready to go same as the last time.  As usual I posed the question to the CITRT IRC chat and quickly was given the answer of Windows SteadyState. It’s a free software available as long as the Windows you are running is legal and legit.  I’m always a big fan of free! The homepage says exactly what I wanted it to:

You can’t always prevent problems during a user session, but now you can undo the whole session. Learn how Windows SteadyState can return your computer and hard disk to its exact condition before the user touched it, simply by rebooting.

It’s pretty simple to setup, just check boxes with all kinds of options that you can turn on and off.  After you get it set-up just the way you want the settings are exportable and importable so you can just load to other computers and have everything match-up just the way you want it.