Don't you wish you could let someone use a computer and do whatever they wanted to it, knowing that you could throw away all of the changes that were made? Sure, you could do that using something like Virtual PC or VMware, but that's not really seamless. It's hard to hide the virtual machine from the user.
There is another solution: the Shared Computer Toolkit, now in the final beta testing cycle. You can find more information about it at http://www.microsoft.com/sharedaccess. What exactly does it do? There are three main components:
- Windows Restriction Tool. Think of this like “group policy without AD“. You can define, through a GUI, what a local user can and cannot do on the machine.
- Windows Accessibility Tool. Also similar to “group policy without AD“, although for appearance-related settings rather than policy-related settings.
- Windows Disk Protection Tool. You can configure the system so that all changes made by some or all users of the computer are temporary. They are written to a separate “scratch“ partition on the disk and can be discarded when the computer is rebooted.
The Windows Disk Protection Tool is the coolest part. Imagine shared lab computers, packaging computers, library computers, training computers, etc. Maybe right now you either refresh them after every use, or just wait until something breaks and then start clean. Imagine if all it took to get them “clean“ again was a quick reboot.