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Transcript of Part 2 of Kevin's interview with the Microsoft's SteadyState Team, 05/17/07, 6 mins 54 secs

TechSoup's Kevin Lo sat down with Microsoft's development team to discuss the new features of SteadyState, version 2.0 of their free public access software formerly known as Shared Computing Toolkit. You will hear first hand on the new features from those to developed it, and other information you may will find relevant for your public access computers.

In this second part, you will hear about more advanced settings and features of SteadyState.

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KL: So my next questions have to do with the administration and deploying of SteadyState, for example, using Sysprep or other cloning software. Can you briefly talk about how one would go about doing that? Or for example exporting certain settings.

GV: I think we are planning a white paper on how to do sysprep at some point, but it hasn’t been written yet, I know internally in our lab people do use it. For regular user management, we have the ability to either through our UI (user interface) or through a script, you can import or export multiple users, so that is a really easy way to deploy to multiple machines. We also have a script that distinguish the mode for disk protection, so it gives you some flexibility there.

KL: I see. A specific question would be, if SteadyState were to revert changes, then would an administrator need to go in to the computer and do a defrag routinely? Like they normally would?

RE: No, and we actually block defrag out. They conflict with how disk protection works. So basically the point with disk protection turned on, the state of the disk doesn’t change very much, so there is really not much point doing defrag.

TT: So before you install SteadyState, and before you turn on your Windows Disk Protection, we do recommend that the system be defragged.

KL And, related to that is the pagefile, which you can’t really move regardless. So, do you have any best practices regarding page file settings?

RE: Yes, we automatically set the pagefile to a fixed size on the system drive. So if you have the page file configured on a different drive it really doesn’t matter.

KL: So Chris (Peters), are you still there? Do you have any further questions that we can talk about?

CP: There were one or two things in the beta that I was curious about. There were a lot of people asking for the “Print Preview” button, or one that can be controlled from SteadyState. Is that implemented on the final version?

GV: No, actually we didn’t, we weren’t able to implement that in the final version unfortunately.

CP: And the other thing that people were asking for possibly a utility that might be able to save your settings in SteadyState, so that when you logoff, maybe you need to unlock the profile, login to the profile and make changes to the desktop arrangement, and then you can log back in the admin account and your SteadyState settings will still be there, then relock the profile.

GV: So you are saying a simple way for that administrator to make changes is to go into the user profile?

CP: Exactly, without having to uncheck all the settings, and then remember what they were, and go back in to re-check them.

GV: Yes we did look at that very seriously after the beta but unfortunately that also didn’t make it into the product.

CP: Is there a migration tool?

RE: Most of the settings are carried over automatically.

CP: When you are doing an upgrade from version 1 to version 2?

TT: Yes, what Rob is saying is true, in that many settings are transferred.

CP: So in other words, when you uninstall the Shared Computing Toolkit, most of the settings that you applied using the Shared Computing Toolkit will be maintained in the profile?

GV: Basically, the way that the Shared Computing Toolkit worked was through user restrictions, is through policy settings. So for those settings, which is a majority of them, they are just going to continue work even after Shared Computing toolkit version 1 is uninstalled. SteadyState will then recognize that user account, read in the group policy restrictions that are in place already, and reflect that in the UI.

CP: Ok, great.

KL: So to follow up on that question then, what would happen to that unpartitioned space that was in version 1 that is no longer needed in version 2?

GV: Well, that is a good question. Windows Disk Protection is fundamentally different between version 1 and version 2. You can, if you have a repartitioning tool, after you uninstall version 1, reclaim that partition, because it is no longer needed.

KL: So naturally, the steps for someone who chooses to migrate would be, first, uninstall the version 1, reclaim that unpartitioned space into a new partition? And then defrag it and install [SteadyState]?

GV: After reclaiming the partition, defrag, then install version 2.

KL: When do you expect the final version be available for release?

EW: Hi, this is Emily. The final version will be available probably around mid-June. In mid-June we are launching in 17 locales, so 17 different countries, in 8 languages.

KL: So that means that the software is tested on the different localized versions of Windows, besides the UI being in those languages it’s tested to work with those versions, is that correct?

RE: That is correct, yes.

KL: Is this a new feature that version 1 didn’t have?

GV: We have most of the languages we wanted, but we added more languages [such as] Dutch, Russian, [Simplified] Chinese.

EW: So the languages that we are launching Windows SteadyState in are Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Italian, Russian, and Simplified Chinese. And then for version two it’s the first time that we actually are offering Simplified Chinese and Russian for this launch.

CP: Is there a release date for the Vista version?

RN: We actually don’t have a release date set for the Vista version that’s something we are currently discussing right now, but as a group we are focusing on this upcoming launch.

CP: Is there some sort of a getting started wizard.

GV: Yes, there is. There is a getting started portion described in the documentation which is automatically launched the first time when SteadyState is run.

EW: So Kevin and Chris, I also wanted to mention that we will be having an updated community site. This is a place where users can come and ask any type of questions or get answers or just get additional support for Windows SteadyState. We are going to be updating that a bit before our launch. So do you have any more questions?

KL: [No]. Thanks Emily for bringing these folks together and having this opportunities to talk to the engineers.

EW: Oh definitely they have been working hard.. I just wanted to say thank you for your time.

KL: Thank you.

CP: Thanks.