SteadyState

A few years ago I worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s U.S. Library Program help desk, where I fielded thousands of calls about the peculiar difficulties of making a computer available for public use. Later when Microsoft released Windows SteadyState 2.0 (formerly known as the Shared Computer Toolkit), a free program that protects public computers and makes them easier to manage, I wrote some articles on how to install it and configure it. So when Microsoft released SteadyState 2.5 this summer, I was curious to try it out.

Many of the libraries that contributed to the Cookbook extol virtues on software that "locks down" or "wipes clean" their public computers. As any librarian will tell you, much of the maintainance of computers is derived from reversing what patrons left behind. Faye Hover from Smith-Welch Memorial Library may have said it best, "because I'm sick to death of coming in in the morning and having everything changed--the background, they would change the wallpaper. I needed something that can prevent them from doing all of this."