Public PC Fix

Well I work in a Cyber cafe, so most definitely we have alot of pc's used by a wide variety of people. "Very Different" People, trust me. So every now and then we are faced with reduction in performance of the pc's during a short period. In fact the time it takes to reduce the performance is almost less than the time it takes to reinstall and reconfigure a new PC. Frustration thus sets in.

I have however decided to take it as a challenge to find a way to beat the deregulation of the PC's, both by reducing the time it takes to drop their performace and to increase the speed of reconfiguration, and in the whole increase efficiency.

The present state of the project for dropping performance is Deepfreeze which is a software that restores the PC to a formerly stored state everytime the system is restarted. Well this was a great idea until many people started losing their documents on both intentional and accidental restarts. The solution proposed is to have a 500mb space on each PC that wasn't frozen and notice to be put all over the hall that this is the strorage location.

The most tricky part of this project is the quick reconfiguration of the PC's in event of a necessity for a reload of OS and the likes. There were two options, either to complete an installation normally and back it up or to get an unattended installation. The first option has the disadvantage of being fixed to hardware so on event of change of hardware there would be some problem with the compatibility. I decided to use a shrinked and unattended version of windows and the programs needed by the customers.

Software used for streaming down windows is nlite. I have Almeza Multiset inview for this.
-Software put on each PC
-Java machine
-Office Lite
-Timer software
-Messengers
-PDF reader
-Internet Explorer
-.NET Framework
-DeepFreeze

All these were silenced and set to unattended mode. I intend to use an action copier to automate installation of the packages that dont support silent mode installation. I dont have the name of that software right now. WIth this method I would successfully strip the PC of all the unused services and packages in windows which would increase efficiency in all aspects. I would also get the PC's configured just by inserting the CD's and waiting. Mission accomplished. Increased efficiency, reduced installation time, increased security and maintenance..