Steady State
So, here’s a little diddy you probably haven’t heard of: SteadyState. I recall way back in the day my CompSci teacher and his flunky (you know who you are) were hell-bent on locking down the lab so those ornery high-schoolers couldn’t break the Windows installations on those machines. They settled on DeepFreeze, but you can achieve virtually the same effect with SteadyState (DeepFreeze offers some extra administrative sugar; SteadyState offers more lockdown features).
To install silently, you’ll first need to break this package apart with 7-zip:
C:\Temp\SteadyState>7z x -oSteadyState SteadyState_Setup_ENU.exe
Then, it’s a simple matter of running update.exe (no option to change the default install directory is available):
C:\Temp\SteadyState\SteadyState\update>start /wait update.exe /quiet
As with most of these, it’s easy once you know the trick. :)
