Also, once you installed something remember to restart your computer once again before putting it back into the frozen state, even if a certain installation doesn’t require a restart.

~Marcus

dont get me wrong deep freeze is a breeze to use, installs in less than a minute restarts your system automatically, set up your password and you are good to go. thaw when you need to change something then freeze when you’re done. no complicated knowledge required to use and maintain.

I had deepfreeze for around a month installed with a year old vista business 32bit installation. got it working fine. till i had the constant inconvinience need to thaw and freeze cycle for my antivirus, windows updates and other programs that need updating frequently to install permanently. You need to restart everytime you need to thaw, then restart again to freeze. that can be a real pain. specially if you use a lot of programs at the same time needing to close and open them everytime you need to do some changes to your system. only if deep freeze had an instant freeze and thaw without restarting.

And very recently (the day before i wrote this), after installing some programs and updating some old ones, i restarted to freeze the system then i got the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH! when my pc got back on with an error indicating “deepfreeze.sys xxxx00xxxerrorcodexxx -timestamp xxsomethingsomethingxx”.

It seemed that deep freeze had an invalid time stamp or snapshot of my system that made my system go to blue screen. first time ever i had with my one year old installation vista. Or something else.

I did nothing wrong with updating my virus definitions and installing some windows defender definitions (which is also regarded as a windows update). and updated my flash player. i just simply did a routine update of my system when the blue screen appeared that was caused by deep freeze. i was completely taken aback by that.

if you were a noob using deep freeze and you encounter this you definitely freak out about what to do, specially that the blue screen appears right before windows loads up leaving you with no obvious options to remedy the problem.

Luckily, a simple press of F8 and a choice of “last known good configuration” fixed the problem. windows loads and deepfreeze seems to be working. unless you restart again then the blue screen appears again.

Even if you choose to thaw the next restart the blue screen still appears.

so i uninstalled deep freeze using its own installer and installed it back again (risking my main vista pc). so far no problems arised after i reinstalled and several restarts thawed or freezed just to check.

So im really not sure what caused deep freeze to cause a blue screen with my vista business 32bit pc. i really dont have a clue! so far its working right now with deep freeze activated.

and thats one experience i have with deep freeze. nothing more to come i hope.

Anyways before installing I recommend a partitioned hard-drive (or multiple drives)(as suggested above) and a clean install of the OS and all important programs.

The next step can be tricky but saves a lot of time and annoyances (and would fix most of the complaints above); firstly you need to determine what files you do want to update even when the computer is in a frozen state.
A personal choice (and a requirement for the other computer uses) was for the My Documents folder, internet browser (bookmarks etc), and the selected email client to be “unfrozen”. Therefore these need to be saved on your unfrozen drive/partition

The My Documents location can be changed by right clicking it; using Firefox you can easily change the location of the browsing profile and after some tweaks (might need to edit the registry here? can’t remember) the profile and emails for Mozilla Thunderbird can also be moved.

For people who want the desktop and other common places to update a program like TweakUI can be used to change the location of the Shared Documents folder and even the location of the Desktop so that any file there will stay even after a restart.
So if you do a little research you should be able to relocate most of those files that you want to remain dynamic.

As my computer is now, everything that is convenient and required to update does so perfectly. It allows me to test a program not having to worry about all the junk that it puts on my machine. And a more permanent change is a restart away.

Although some effort was put in to achieve this it was thoroughly worth it; Marcus Hochstadt is giving 100% brilliant advise.

Thanks

~Marcus

I am using deepfreeze for 2 months now but its icon do not display on the desktop that i cannnot shift to unfrozen state im using windows vista, what will i do i can save data and even change my screen saver! hope you can help me tnx.

It’s good to know, but it does not apply to my case. I do not rent the temporary use of my “so many” computers to strangers.

I have just three, I and my wife use them personally, and Deep Freeze protects them wonderfully, plus the computers run as smooth as on their first day.

~Marcus

Better have a look!

~Marcus

Who said you cannot make changes; you can always make changes. Simply put your computer temporarily into the “Thawed state,” make the changes, and restart to the frozen state. So your “no more” points are all invalid. ;-)

Although… I wouldn’t care about “Windows bug fixes” anymore. My computer is running bug-free since I installed Deep Freeze — that alone saves me a whole bunch of valuable time. ;-)

And regarding saving bookmarks and files, simply map these to a Thawed (unprotected) partition or drive and you’re able to store all that data, while still enjoying the total system consistency. Besides this, I use an external hard drive for the most critical files so I can quickly and flawlessly move from the PC to the laptop if needed.

~Marcus

(1) Windows keeps all valuable data on C:, all updated data, registry, everything – obviously, C: gets frozen, so no more changes to Windows even as tiny as a new shortcut to a desktop.

(2) No more new program installations – I can’t live without it.

(3) No more Windows updates – how the bugs are going to be fixed?

(4) No more changes to user interface – I’m stuck with the same for the near future.

(5) No more Firefox etc history, downloads, bookmarks, plugins and so on.

Marcus, honestly and from my heart, I don’t know how you live with that – you obviously explained, but as a computer guy I still don’t understand. If that helps you and you’re happy, good luck, but this thing is not for me.

DeepFreeze is the best application for keeping computers safety from error or viruses attack.

I have used this application since so long. But one day, I want to disable this application I can not type the passwords. And on the title bar wrote “Application not respond”. As the result I can not disable the application. On the other hand, sometime the icon also not view that cause I can not Shift Click on it.

Can you give me a solution beside of format window?

Your Faithfully

Vuthy Bun