Re:Deep Freeze a great solution (Score 1)

At the school I used to go to which was part of a large district of 3 highschools 3 junior highs and around 13 elementry schools, deepfreeze became the main method of securing all of the computers when the switch to xp was done. Students then all had limited administrator accounts and could do most things, including installing applications. The advantage is that your computers do not themeselves get messed up, however it can make monitoring students by looking at logs or internet history a little harder since all of that information is erased with a reboot. In general if you want to prevent all of the activities such as playing games then there really is no great solution that I can think of other than just have a good acceptable use policy which all the students must follow, allowing them to recieve punishment if they are doing what they are not supposed to.

Although costly and a little more complicated, my old district also implemented a packet shaper. It was able to eliminate the use of all instant messangers, some games and limit the bandwidth to such things as streaming video.

My friends and I intentionally used deepfreeze so that we could install firefox, and dreamweaver to use during one of our classes and then would simply hit the reset button on the pc after class to get rid of it.