New OS, new hope.

[TechJackass88]

This is mini guide on how to keep your OS fresh forever.

Well, I managed to kill my OS over the weekend, now freshly reloaded and ready to roll, I set on voyage to preserve it as fresh as I could, and here is my findings, for those who been doing this before, don't kick me too hard me, but for ones that new, might be an interesting project. No, I'm not talking about ghosting system, every sane computer tech has ghost of their system, what I was working on is Deep Freeze, very well known in schools and cyber cafe's, and for those who familiar with this software, you know how sometimes you'd wish to have a peice of two worlds, Frozen system and thawed user documents, well, I managed to do just that, plus nifty bonus of partially frozen registry as well. and here how I did it: Split my SSD in 2 partitions, 80 and 40 gigs, installed system on bigger one, and did all updates, software install, well, everything, now, if we freeze it just like that, you wont have freedom of thawed desktop and my documents, here what I did: Enabled administrator account, and logged in to it, copy my user folder to second partition, and went to registry, "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList"
(now, if you don't know what you doing, and have a mess of permissions, you will lock yourself out, and mght not see your files ever again, also drive is not encrypted so clean up user permissions.)
This particular key ties HKLM and HKCU, system registry and user registry, and you will see where I'm going in just a moment, since I moved user folder to different drive, user portion of registry has been moved as well, only thing you have to do now, is to find class ID of your profile and reference "ProfileImagePath" to new location, which in my case is "D:\Users\TJ88" now after few reboots and verifications, that your user folder indeed on separate drive, live and kicking (I created reference text documents for myself with random names) you can freeze your system drive solid, while leaving out storage and user drive thawed, effectively rendering your system 99% immune to any infection, and unwanted installations, leaving you in control. Since you have frozen copy of your pre-set profile on system disk, recovery made very easy, down to boot, login as admin, copy frozen profile over corrupt one, done.
again, this is result of my personal research, and my curent system setup, which I enjoy alot. thought I'd share, and yes, getting a copy of deepfreeze might be an issue, guys at faronics not too talkative.
Please comment.

[xeromist]

Interesting idea. How does this affect things like automatic anti-virus updates or other applications that have automatic patching features?

[TechJackass88]

Has no affect at all, AV or other software will keep bugging you with updates until moment you thaw machine and let them update.
however if by miracle you can get your hands on Deep Freeze Enterprise, you can set up schedules for this sort of things.
unless they store their settings in User portion of registry, or/and installed on User Drive... there's lots of room to play and fine tune.

[xeromist]

Well, for AV I don't want to have a schedule. Everything else can wait but I want the latest definitions as soon as they are available. Hrmm, I wonder if you can get tricky with hard linking at the file system level.

[TechJackass88]

well, you might even get away with symbolic link to AV folder, from other location... that shouldn't be a problem... what AV you running? I will test it today when I get home on mine, I'm using Avira 2012 PRO and Malwarebytes. but have no problem trying other software as well.

[xeromist]

I use Avast but if you're tricking it at the file system level I'd think Avira would be the same or very similar anyway.

[TechJackass88]

Well, symbolic link works, not sure how well, need some time to do a full evaluation, but so far Paranoid TJ88 can relax. system passed it's security check.