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[Updated December 6th, 2009]

I am responsible (in varying capacities) for approximately 700 or so public machines within a system of libraries.  The majority of these machines are public access consoles used primarily for web access.  Because these machines are a) used by a large number of users, b) directly overseen by non-technical staff, and c) updated and serviced infrequently, we rely on a variety of security measures to keep them running smoothly.  For the last few years we have used Steady State to prevent public users from making any permanent changes to the system.

And the Windows 7 came along.

In my particular setup, my organization is not responsible for purchasing machines; we only maintain them.  As such, many of the libraries have chosen to move to Windows 7 and the burden has fallen on myself and my staff to maintain them however.  Sadly, Windows Steady State does not appear to be a viable solution for Windows 7 at this time.

I created this post in case anyone else searches Windows 7 Steady State, Windows 7 Kiosk, or anything similar to that.  Hopefully I can save everyone some time.  Here’s what I’ve learned so far…

During the beta and release candidate versions of Windows 7 there was a feature called PC Safeguard.  This feature included most of the functionality that can currently be found within Windows Steady State 2.5, however it was removed in a later release.

The follow up functionality was named Guest Mode (not to be confused with the guest account) and it also performed roughly the same functionality as Steady State.  As you may have surmised this was also removed prior to the retail release of Windows 7.  (Some history on Guest Mode)

As for Steady State 2.5, it does not work with Windows 7.  Further, there seems to be some indication that Steady State will—never—with with Windows 7.  (Source)

Alternate solutions:

A.  I’m personally pushing Linux.  My users need web access, office functionality, and the ability to listen to music.  Creating a base locked down kiosk version of Ubuntu should be trivial.  (Possibly using Remastersys)

B. Continue to use XP machines.  Currently XP support will be discontinued April, 8th, 2014, which is plenty far away, but XP is almost a decade old.  Alternately, Steasy State works with Vista.  My experiences with Vista have been decent overall, but there seems to be no support within my neck of the woods for Vista usage.

C. Use Deep Freeze.  This works similar to Steady State, but it costs money that simply doesn’t exist for my libraries.  It is a non-option for me, but it does support Windows 7.

D. Cobble together something for Windows 7.  It’s time-consuming and tedious, but I’ve been cobbling together local group policies that lock down the non-administrator accounts.

Item D Explored: I’ll expand this section as I learn things.

1#: a great article on how to do this stuff.   It’s for Vista, but it’s worked for me with Windows 7.

2#: It doesn’t appear there’s any local policy to create the equivalent to Disk Protection.

3#: I can rename the Guest Account and potentially use that.  Still a very lame way of doing this.