OT: Inhibiting persistent changes to a workstation

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- Don Y
  
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posted
10 years ago

Wed, Oct 2, 2013 12:37 AM

I've volunteered at a few places where we see (literally) thousands of machines donated each year. The number of machines that come in with "dead" drives is astonishingly few. Esp when you consider there was *some* reason the donor opted to "discard" the machine.

Well, thinking only about power consumption (conservation), spinning a disk down *does* save power -- *if* it's going to *stay* spun down! So, in a laptop, etc. it's a viable way to extend battery life.

Problem comes when you use such a drive in an app that won't let the drive "idle".

I have several (disk-based) iPods that I've had no problems with (so far). The Zune came to me "failing" so I have no idea what sort of life it had before...

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- krw
  
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posted
10 years ago

Wed, Oct 2, 2013 7:32 PM

Most probably have Win problems or malware that the user couldn't deal with (or couldn't be bothered). Hardware is so cheap, these days, that, for most, it's not worth messing with.

Agreed but as you point out the system has to have some intelligence. I tend not to allow the disk to spin down unless the system is idle for some time.

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posted
10 years ago

Sun, Nov 17, 2013 8:06 AM

They, in fact, changed their minds and wanted XP -- I guess some of the staff felt this to be a better choice as THEY would have to support the students!

Given XP, I opted to save a few bucks for them and went with MS's SteadyState (free if you can find an archived copy). This was tedious to install (cuz it keeps wanting to throw away your changes!) and poorly documented (probably 100 settings and the documentation for each consists of essentially the *label* alongside each checkbox!!).

Most annoying is the MS approach that "they know best" how things should be set up. So, they silently make changes to your settings that aren't immediately visible -- unless you are disciplined to VERIFY them, after the fact!

So, after a fair bit of experimentation, I've been able to set up

*a* (test) machine with all the applications they wanted/needed to see how well it fares, deployed.

It's a bit sluggish booting and shutting down/restarting. But, nothing unusual for a MS product :-/

I'll clone the first system onto the remaining 9 once they bless its operation. Maybe next week...

This *may* be a viable solution (kludge) for folks wanting to keep XP running past April...