Windows Steady State by Microsoft - Useful or Useless?

[Scooter]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...s/default.mspx

Microsoft Windows Steady State is a FREE system protection utility that protects shared computers from system changes by users. Kind of a super user-permissions tweak. But it seems to do a lot more, with the ability to run each user in a session so that the system can't be changed.

I'm going to test it on XP Pro SP3 and see what it does. I downloaded the manual to read.

Anyone feel like giving it a shot in Vista to test as well?

Let's play with this and discuss it.

[Young_Freebie]

I'm game, I'm willing to test my Vista laptop with this.. if it works for Home Premium

EDIT: Yeah, it download, small too. Not even seven megs, and if it works, then I can see a use for it right away. Helping my sister and mother with their programs, limit them to theirs, and Dad and I can use it to have more piece of mind.

[Scooter]

Here's a great quick walkthrough from Lifehacker on setting it up. The .pdf manual from Microsoft is a huge chunk to digest.

http://lifehacker.com/397786/kid+pro...th-steadystate

[Young_Freebie]

P. says that it doesn't stop connecting to the internet. I wouldn't know, I just let it cross.

N.

[Scooter]

After running it in a tightly controlled environment (virtual machine, minimal software installs, fully updated with SP3), I found that the XP environment began to crawl for no apparent reason. The only explanation is that somehow Steady State was bogging things down.
I can't tell at this point if the problem is a memory usage creep or if perhaps Steady State id putting up too many processes and threads for my resources to handle.

It came to the point where XP was almost not responding, and this was in the admin account that did not have Steady State active on it.