Tools similar to Deep Freeze for Personal Use?

Question

I'm not sure how many people do this, but when I worked at my university, we purchased a site license to Deep Freeze, which essentially allows a computer's state to be saved and restored to it's original state every reboot of the computer. I'm looking to find something similar to this for a friend's computer.

Basically, she has kids that install alot of demos, games, and such on the computer, and cruft and spyware gets accumulated over time (Windows XP computer btw). Is there some tool that would allow her state to be restored to a previous one like I am used to with VMWare or this Deep Freeze tool? I would like to save the time of going through a Windows XP format/reinstall every few months, forcing her to have to install her own software as well (like Office 2003, Firefox, AVG, etc.)

I don't think she'd be happy to have her computer's state restored every reboot, but I would like something that would allow me to restore the computer to some defined state, most likely right after I've got it all configured and set up after a fresh reinstall of Windows XP.

It just seems so much nicer to work in a VM when this stuff happens...

Answer 1

There is also steady state, a free utility from Microsoft. Here is the wiki for it. It works great for Windows 7 only. It is discontinued as of Jan 2012.

Answer 2

You can buy single copies of deep freeze.

I don't think she'd be happy to have her computer's state restored every reboot.

Setup deep-freeze, Leave a partition thawed, set her user-profile so that it is copied to the thawed drive at each login/logout. Redirect her desktop and my document folders to the thawed drive. Give her the password in case she needs to install something, and strongly encourage her to freeze the machine when the install is done.

I have setup both my mothers and grandparents computers like this so I don't have to reinstall the system every few weeks. If redirect enough of what she is doing to that thawed partition then most people really don't mind having their system revert to exact state on each reboot.

As an alternative you can simply use something like Acronis Trueimage will make incremental full images of the system.

Answer 3

http://clonezilla.org/

Works similarly to Norton's Ghost - you can save the exact state and go back to it. And its Free!

Answer 4

There is a forum that explain the differences between the reboot and restore type products you can take a look at:

http://alternativeto.net/software/deep-freeze/ and also http://horizondatasys-forum.com/drive-vaccine/16809-deep-freeze-clean-slate-comparison.html

Answer 5

Norton Ghost with a recovery disk. Takes about 8-10min (depending on how much software is installed on the PC) to restore the PC.

I use it all the time to restore laptops back to their original installed state with all the drivers, etc.

HUGE time saver over reinstalling, then drivers, then patching, etc, etc... as long as you don't have to worry about backing up anything (pictures, documents, etc) before you wipe the system.

Answer 6

You can use Acronis True Image to restore your system. This software can create a bootable media for restoring your Windows Vista.

Answer 7

I know this thread is a Bit old now however I think i found something pretty neat for a free software, if anyone is still looking for an alternative to deep freeze and want something for free, I just found out that there is a product calledReboot Restore Rx available.

Essentially it is kind of like Windows SteadyState but works for Windows 7 and 8. I downloaded it yesterday on one of my systems and so far works great. the best part is its FREE

Here is the link to the page: http://www.horizondatasys.com/products_and_solutions.aspx?ProductId=18