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My situation:

I'm a schoolteacher getting 10-15 Pentium D (early dual-core) systems donated to my school. We'll probably create one or two small labs with them. District IT would take months to get around to them and take away admin control from the faculty, so I want to deploy myself. I have access to a site licensed windows disk.

Two questions:

1) Is nlite the best solution for unintended windows installs? I can borrow a conference room for about a day to wipe and reinstall the machines, and want some sort of unattended boot disk I can use for all of them.

2) How should I set the computers up to make sure the kiddies can't break anything?

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First, One question per question please. :) Question #1 is very broad and subjective (The "Best"? There's too many 'bests') and Question #2 is a duplicate of Easy way to restrict permissions in an elementary school computer lab?. – techie007 Jun 7 '11 at 23:51
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If you're planning on deploying & maintaining it yourself, a Linux-based network may give you more for your time & effort. There's plenty of OSS software out there to provide an excellent computing education. – Joe Internet Jun 8 '11 at 0:07
I would also recommend checking your license. I know of no "disk" that comes as a site license. There is volume licensing, but that does not come on a disk: It is downloaded and usually run from an install point on the network. It is possible to make a home-made disk from the install point, but if your disk is commercially made, it is doubtful you can put it on all your computers. technibble.com/… – KCotreau Jun 8 '11 at 2:10
XP is end-of-life-ed already. I think you would be doing your students a disservice by having them learn something that they will never see or use later. – Keith Jun 8 '11 at 3:37
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2 Answers

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2.) I would suggest Windows Steady State, although Microsoft no longer supports or distributes this software, it can be found on the Internet, it is the best way to lock down XP and make it easy to roll back changes automatically.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Windows+Steady+State

There is also a handbook available, get it while it lasts http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=f829bb8b-c7a9-426b-a7a4-2b504a6238d2

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Nlite is useful for part of the problem, you can automate, for example, popping in the install key. You might also want to look up setting up unattended installs for common software.

An alternate way would be (if the hardware was mostly identical) and had the same site key, image it and sling the image out to multiple boxen via clonezilla server and DRBL-winroll.. You'd just need a load of plugpoints, a system to act as the server, and a router or switch handy.

In addition to steady-state, if you choose to deploy it, i'd seriously considering imaging the systems post install.

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