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Leaving a computer in my rental unit - question

K

klingsor

Senior member
I have a condo that I am going to use as a rental this ski season. I'd like to leave a computer here, so that guests can dilly around on the internet and check their email. I buil;t the comp from stuff I had lying around which means it is relatively slow and only has a 2GB HD; because of that I want ot limit the amount of stuff that a renter can put on the HD, and I certainly don't want them installing AOL or Compuserve. The library computers have a way of controlling what is downloaded and installed, I wonder if you guys know of anything I can use for this?

Thanks
 
Well one thing that may be easier is to take a different approach.

Instead of limiting the install stuff and downloads you could take a imaging tool like Ghost and take a image of the OS after you get installed, setup, and updated. And put that on a second harddrive or a laptop or a external harddrive or something.

Then after people have left, you hook up the second drive/connect your laptop and use Ghost to restore the image.

Hell you could fit 2gigs easily on a DVD, so you could even restore from that.

A image basicly is a entire bit by bit copy of the harddrive/partition into a individual file you can move around...

That way your renters can have full use of the computer, install a bunch of crap on it, install a bunch of spyware and viruses on it, but you just copy over the image when they leave and it's as good as new. The whole proccess would take 15 to 20 minutes.
 
Another option is to setup multiple partitions, giving your guests only access to one of the partitions. Then when they're gone, reformat that partition or use Ghost to restore the partition.

I don't know how to prevent them from installing specific programs, but I know how to prevent them from installing new software. Use user accounts in windows xp pro and restrict their privileges.

dfi
 
I'd second Acronis if it wasn't that you can get Ghost so cheap (Norton System Wooks 2003 Pro OEM less than $20 around the web - Pro version includes Ghost. Don't get NSW 2004 Pro, skanky relative to 2003 version).
.bh.
 
Ever used DeepFreeze? I think in this situation it would be better than re-imaging a harddrive all the time. Just get all the necessary software installed, install deepfreeze and set it up...then everytime the computer is rebooted it will go back to the original configuration, the users could "Format c:" you just hit reset and it will all be back...check it out.
 
You can install XP and setup a limited account on there with restrictions. They wouldn't be able to instal anything and you wouldn't have to worry about restoring your drives. Just restrict everything but IE.
 
Thanks you guys for all your help. I looked into DeepFreeze and that seems to be the best solution for my needs, and probably in combination with some other suggestions.

I can't believe how helpful you all were. Thanks heaps.
 
Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
UltimateBootCD is free and contains a few disk cloning tools. 😀

- M4H
Click to expand...

Thanks! I haven't seen UltimateBootCD before and it looks very tasty.
 
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