SteadyState 2.5 Now Available (Now Supporting Vista)

Coming off the LABMAN conference from a few weeks ago, I know many in the EDU community rely on disk protection and lock down tools such as Faronic's DeepFreeze and SteadyState.  At the end of last week, we made SteadyState 2.5 available for free download - big deal here is now we can lock-down and disk protect Vista workstations.  You can get this here.  Here is a bullet list of the new features:

 

New features in SteadyState version 2.5 include the following:

• Full support for Windows Vista

• Full support for Internet Explorer 7 and tabbed browsing

• Overall improved performance

• Faster booting

• Faster system caching

• Remote management of Windows Disk Protection through scripting

• Improved importing & exporting  of user information

 

Also, I thought I blogged about this in the past but apparently I have not (or at least I cannot find the post), but yes, with SteadyState, you do have the ability to control the state of 'Disk Protection' via command line by making calls to the machines WMI interface - KB938355 explains this.  Also this old forum post gives some sample scripts to turn WDP on and off as well.  For you folks familiar with DeepFreeze this would be going from 'frozen' to 'thaw'.  Granted, not as fancy as DeepFreeze as we do not offer a GUI console for SteadyState, but our price is a bit better (free download) if you are comfortable with making changes via script (or better yet, using something like ConfigMgr to modify the protection states when changes are needed).