Deep Freeze and XP on Zone PC #3

[jonathaw]

In the Zone today....
A very nice gentleman was using PC #3 (? the one farthest from the office) and it crashed on him, which it is known to do. He had a paper saved on the desktop, and now it's bye-bye. The solution is to save things to the D: drive and deep freeze won't kill it.
This brings up a dilemma that I'd like to share with y'all.
We have signs that pop up when you log on saying save stuff to the D: drive, but I think most people pass that off as an annoying pop-up, something to click away immediately. On the other hand, we could make it so you can ONLY save to D:, but that could be pretty confusing and then the D: drive would fill up with everyone's crap.

I suppose the real solution would be to get a PC that doesn't crash so often... but as long as we're stuck with the testy one, any thoughts on this? I feel really bad when people lose work and I can't do anything about it.

[dparm]

Hmm that is something I have never given much thought to. But then again, people really should be saving documents to something like a flash drive. Perhaps we should inform clients about Deep Freeze to avoid this in the future.

[fischerm]

I know with Macs, you can move user directories to different drives, thus having the 'desktop' be on the other drive and keeping it safe from Deep Freeze, this should be possible with windows too no? or do they HAVE to live inside Documents and Settings? Can all of Documents and Settings be moved?

[dparm]

IIRC, in DeepFreeze, you can set a directory(s) that do not get frozen. You could just set My Documents to not get frozen. This is usually the default save location for most programs. Tell users they MUST save to that directory or they risk losing their files.

In Windows XP, you can set a different folder/drive to act like My Documents.

[jharriso]

We actually do have the D: drive set as the my documents folder, but have been unable to find a hack that will set the desktop to point at the D: drive. We do have multiple signs and popups warning users that, unless they save to D:, their documents WILL BE DELETED if they reboot.
If it's possible, I think that not freezing C:\Documents and Settings\%%USER%%\Desktop would be a great idea, because, even though we have the signs posted, they do get ignored, and people get upset.
The moral of the story: NEVER SAVE ANYTHING YOU CARE ABOUT ON ANYTHING BUT YOUR OWN MEDIA.

[dparm]

Try downloading the TweakUI powertoy, you can specify a new default Desktop IIRC.

[brendanw]

Before you mess with TweakUI, Dustin and I can set folder redirection for MyDocuments to the D: drive with Group Policy. One of the great features of Group Policy is you can tweak almost anything that the user sees with it.

We can also set it to redirect to a folder on one of our servers. This is how we have the other labs setup, but when we originally configured the Zone computers, using folder direction to the server was decided against.

Let me know if it is something you would like me to do.

[jharriso]

Obviously it's something to run by Chris Stagg first, but yeah, if you can get the desktop to point to D:, we'd have much happier users I think.
My Documents already points at D:, that's what it looks like anyhoe, so that should be good to go.