Microsoft kills Steady State

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

http://www.infoworld.com/t/windows/microsoft-kills-windows-steadystate-380?source=rss_infoworld_blogs

Microsoft kills Windows SteadyState

Windows SteadyState, long favored by small organizations with PCs shared by guest users, just got the axe

Windows SteadyState is a handy tool for managing stand-alone PCs in public venues that cater to a motley crew of guest users. In a recent, terse announcement, Microsoft pulled the plug: "SteadyState will be phased out effective December 31, 2010. Microsoft will no longer support Windows SteadyState after June 30, 2011."

Thousands of libraries, small organizations, nonprofits, Internet cafés, schools, and admins who support Windows computers available to the general public are up the ol' creek without a PC paddle. Even large organizations with pools of publicly available PCs that aren't connected to the corporate network have come to rely on SteadyState.

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Is Steady State it's own OS, or does it run on top of some version of Windows? If so - what version(s)?

Is Steady State part of MSDN or Technet?

[Guest]

XP and Vista

No

[Glenn9999]

Is Steady State it's own OS, or does it run on top of some version of Windows? If so - what version(s)?

It runs on top of XP or Vista (as was said). To go beyond that from my experience (and memory, I played with it not soon after it came out), it mainly functions as an on-the-top monitor, which limits access to certain things, and more over prevents permanent changes to settings or the system drive. In effect it limits critical changes and records all other changes and then performs a rollback of any changes once the user logs off. I found it interesting and very useful as a free option for public machines, but found it to slow down a modern system considerably. If one is able to pay much (most public machine owners aren't), there are better options for this.

To that end, there are many people in these public machine situations that are crying and clamoring for a version of this software that supports Windows 7, and are refusing to adopt Windows 7 without having this functionality. As well, they are complaining pretty hard to Microsoft about discontinuing support of the version that is out there now.

As for the average PC user, it's an interesting toy to play with and see what it is in case you end up doing computer maintenance for a non-profit (the chief users of SteadyState).

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

To that end, there are many people in these public machine situations that are crying and clamoring for a version of this software that supports Windows 7, and are refusing to adopt Windows 7 without having this functionality. As well, they are complaining pretty hard to Microsoft about discontinuing support of the version that is out there now.

Why would a public machine, running Steadystate, need anything more sophisticated or current than XP?

Why isin't it part of MSDN or Technet?

Where can you download it from?

[Glenn9999]

Why would a public machine, running Steadystate, need anything more sophisticated or current than XP?

They wouldn't. The problem is if they can't obtain those licenses when they get to replace computers (either by purchase or donation). Lots run Vista now simply because that's what they ended up with. The same will be with Windows 7 - they simply won't have the option because Microsoft doesn't give it to them without additional costs they can't justify as not-for-profits (and for donations they have to take what they can get). As a side note, most of them aren't unified on OS because they got to take what they can get when they can get it.

Edit: And you'd think Linux would be the perfect solution as well, but they got to go with the talent they can get, too. Usually they have to accept preloads because they don't know how to load or support Linux and have something relatively mainstream to be taken seriously by the public at large.

Why isin't it part of MSDN or Technet?

Don't know. Perhaps they don't figure SteadyState is of interest to the average corporate entity.

Where can you download it from?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=d077a52d-93e9-4b02-bd95-9d770ccdb431&displaylang=en

Edited September 7, 2010 by Glenn9999

[Tripredacus]

Is Steady State different than the RAM-Overlay option in the Embedded products?

[MagicAndre1981]

Steady State was part of Windows 7 Beta, but was removed in RC.

[cluberti]

From what I understand, Andre is right that Guest Mode in the Win7 betas was supposed to supplant SteadyState, but the feature was axed before Win7 RTM. We've not heard anything from Microsoft on how this is going to go down with Win7, so hopefully we'll hear more before June 2011 on how to do this without non-free, non-Microsoft tools on Windows 7.