I was thinking last night and thought of trying to do something like this :

I have a 320 gig hard drive and was thinking of partitioning it 20GB/300GB

With the 30GB patition I would install my operating system (Windows Xp) and deepfreeze it. So everytime I restart anything which effected the os has no effect.

And with the 300GB it would just be my place to hold my data files.

Would this work? If it did, It would keep my system folder minimal.

I don't quite understand. You talk about 20gb/300gb and then suddenly talk about 30gb. Anyway, i'm not sure what you mean by deepfreeze, but if what you meant was:

Install Xp on the 20gb partition and apps/games on the 300gb, then yes, it would work. The main advantage is that when you re-install, all your games should be fine on the partition. However, you will have a problem with a few of your apps. Most apps leave lots of files, reg entries etc. during installation. When you format/re-install, the app will look for these files and eventually not run.

This will definitely work, many schools and other public computers use this system.

Thanks LLXX

I believe Kinko's has a system similar to this.

When you go to Kinko's and plugin your USB drive, it loads the drivers and you do your stuff. When you finish, it logs off and resets everything.

Therefore, next time you use it, it has to load your USB drivers again.

I believe if you create an image of your OS drive, all your reg entries and program locations will be captured in the image, so you can certainly do this.

I do this to a number of my users. Works great. Especially when they don't have admin rights. I haven't had a spyware/virus infection in the last 10 months, which is when I started this.

Makes reloading quick also, just remember it will not reuse user profiles.

Make sure that you install all of your programs, then run DeepFreeze, otherwise like someone mentioned before, a majority of your programs won't work.