Guest Account Management

[TitanOne]

Greetings from the strange lands of Germany!

 

(I don't know if this belongs here, but we'll see :/)

At place I'm doing volunteer work for I am responsible for the guest PCs, mostly used by children.

 

As one might guess, they like to mess with EVERYTHING on the computers, giving me a hard time (Windows 10 is not helping with the setup process). And because they are funny little buggers, it's often stuff that is important to system functionality, forcing me to reinstall HECCIN' Windows yet again! (Yes, they SOMEHOW magically do that without a Admin password, even though I set the account to non-admin)

 

Is there some (preferably free or REALLY cheap) way to make my life easier? Like, I just access the machines from another one or even a phone and like, reset them to a certain state?

 

It's five PCs, with an open Guest account and an password protected Admin account. I honestly don't know how old those are. Or the hardware they have.

 

Thanks for coming to my TED-Talk half-rant, half-cry for help

[Electronics Wizardy]

Are these systems managed by a server or active directory at all? That will make this much easier?

 

There are solutions like deep freeze that will wipe a system back to a normal state everynight, but you have to update those images at times with updates.

 

How are they reaking the system? Id lock down the accounts some more.

[Mira Yurizaki]

There's a tool called Deep Freeze which will reset Windows to a known state every time the computer is rebooted.

 

You could also make sure the other account you want them to use has basically only read/execute permissions on everything except the account's user folder.

[Slayerking92]

2 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

There's a tool called Deep Freeze which will reset Windows to a known state every time the computer is rebooted.

 

You could also make sure the other account you want them to use has basically only read/execute permissions on everything except the account's user folder.

THIS.

 

I have done a lot of IT work for schools.  Deep Freeze is the standard for keeping machines running.  Users can only make changes to files in folders you specify.  if they manage to break it, a reboot will bring it back to its last frozen state.  It does also defrost for patching and will re-freeze when done.

 

https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze/enterprise

 

Microsoft did have a tool called "steady state" for win xp, but they discontinued that and wanted people to use the system restore functionally in win7 onwards.

 

I just did a quick search and found there is a free option,  I have never tried it, so I can't vouch for how good it is.

 

https://horizondatasys.com/reboot-restore-rx-freeware/

[TitanOne]

I will definitely have to try that, thanks!

[Mikensan]

If you wanted to have a little bit of fun you could take a spare computer to setup as a PXE boot server. That way you have one image to rule them all.

 

https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-SE/

 

There's many other free pxe boot solutions, this is just the first one that popped up in my mind.