Freeze your hard drives with Deep Freeze and stop worrying about changes in your system
March 30th, 2009 | Published on: Review
Your kids or friends use your computer from time to time and do a total mess? Don´t worry, there is a solution: Deep Freeze. This software “freezes” your hard drive and any change that you make on your system, including deleting files, will have no effect upon restarting. Deep Freeze will keep your computer as good as new at all times.
Deep Freeze
If your computer is kept in an environment where many other people have access to it, you could be looking at one continual headache, especially if some of these users are not particularly computer-savvy. To prevent possible disasters, you could implement Deep Freeze, a tool which “freezes” the operating system, preventing any changes being made to the operating system. Everytime you shutdown your PC, only the files kept on non-freezed drives will be saved.
When Deep Freeze is installed it generates a complete copy of the hard disk you choose, which is then loaded every time the system starts up. The only problem is that any files that you don’t save to a “fixed” partition or a network drive will be lost if the PC is accidentally switched off or restarted.
The installation process consists of choosing the drives we wish to freeze. This is the one and only stage of the installation, therefore it´s recommended that you shut down all applications before proceeding to ensure it installs without issues. You can thaw the drives at any time, so don’t worry if you froze the wrong ones.
The installation has certain requirements that must be strictly adhered to, such as the deactivation of any antivirus application, for example. Once the process has finished, Deep Freeze presents you with a compact, simple interface from which you can control both the freezing of the system and the “Clone” feature, designed to prepare master images for deployment onmultiple machines.
This is extremely handy when cloning several PCs with the same hardware components.
Another interesting feature is setting restriction for specific users so they can´t access certain folders, system tools, configuration panels. By doing so, we can protect our most valuable data from being modified.
According to our tests, the program remains stable whilst the computer is frozen. The only problems may come if the protection is removed after a long period of time and many system files need to be updated.
Deep Freeze is an interesting tool for public-access computers which would otherwise need constant maintenance, taking up valuable time and effort. However, it can be a bit uncomfortable to successfully implement Deep Freezee on home PCs if we are constantly installing new programs or modifying files.
No related posts.
