Boot BartPE from a flash drive

For a while now I’ve been looking for a way to use a flash drive to boot up a computer into BartPE. The CD works fine, but it is a little on the slow side. There are a few utilities that come with BartPE that are suppose to do this for you, but I haven’t been able to get them to work correctly (or not at all seeing as the machine wouldn’t boot from the flash drive).

After looking around for a bit, and doing some research, I finally found a small utility that will make the flash drive bootable and install BartPE onto the flash drive.

The utility is called PeToUSB, and can be found here. It’s a small program that provides a GUI for making the bootable BartPE flash drive. It has worked great for me so far.

Registry Hacks For Windows XP

This is a list of registry hacks that I usually use on public computers. These help to just lock things down a little more.

You have to be careful when working in the registry. Doing something wrong can result in a non-booting system, which sometimes isn’t recoverable. Use these with extreme caution.

To access the registry, you need to be using an account that has administrative privileges. You can set the Public account to be an administrator while you’re setting it up, then switch it to a limited account once everything is setup. Log into the account, then go to Start and choose Run. In the Run box, type regedit.

Disable right click on the Start menu:

Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

– Right click the empty space on the right hand pane, and chose new -> DWORD value

– Name the new value NoTrayContextMenu

– Double click the new value and set it to 1 (1 = On, 0 = Off)

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Restrict access to the Control Panel:

Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

– Right click the empty space on the right hand pane, and choose new -> DWORD value

– Name the new value NoControlPanel

– Double click the new value and set it to 1 (1 = On, 0 = Off)

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Stop Internet Explorer 7 from automatically installing:

Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\7.0
(if the full path isn’t there, you can create it)

– Right click the empty space on the right hand pane, and choose new -> DWORD value

– Name the new value: DoNotAllowIE70

– Double click the new value and set it to 1 (1 = On, 0 = Off)

**This will only prevent IE7 from installing automatically via Windows Updates. You can still download and install IE7 via the executable available from Microsoft**

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Prevent MSN Messenger from running:

Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

– Right click the MSMSGS value, and select delete

Programs for the public

I thought I would take a few minutes and write down some of the programs I usually install on public access computers. There aren’t many of them, but these few programs are usually enough to meet the demands of the average user. As you can see, most revolve around the Internet.

I’ve split these up into free and non-free programs:

Free Programs:
– Adobe Reader
– Quicktime
– Windows Media Player
– Flash Plugin (for Internet Explorer and Firefox)
– Shockwave Player
– Firefox
– Java Runtime Environment

Non-free programs:
– Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher)
– Nero
– Antivirus software (I recommend NOD32 or AVG)
– Security software (Clean Slate or DeepFreeze)

Some other programs you might want to look into include:
– Realplayer
– Spyware Blaster
– iTunes

That’s about it. I usually don’t allow the users to install their own programs, but some people do allow this. It really depends on the amount of control you want to have over the computers. I don’t allow programs to be installed due to the risk of viruses and spyware.

You may have noticed that I didn’t include any instant messaging clients. I don’t include any of them because most of them can cause problems. The AIM client from AOL and the Yahoo! Messenger client don’t ever seem to want to work correctly, and there can be problems with privacy (auto login, chat logs, etc). This isn’t really a problem because there are great services out there such as Meebo. Meebo offers users the ability to log into any of the major IM networks via a web interface. This is perfect because the user isn’t limited and I don’t have to install unstable software on the computers.

Firefox 2 Session Restore Flaw

Today I noticed a little flaw in Firefox 2. There is a session restore feature in Firefox 2 that will restore your previous session if something happens (like your computer freezing, rebooting at random, etc.). While this feature may be handy for private use, on a public computer this is a little bit of a privacy issue. This feature would allow a patron to access the web pages that the patron before them had been visiting. Not a good thing.

I did find a fix for it, and it’s rather simple. You’ll need to do this for each account you want to turn the session restore feature off on:

1. Open Firefox and type in about:config in the navigation bar.

2. Look for browser.sessionstore.enabled

3. Double click the line to disable it.

I tested this on one of my public computers and it did the trick. There are also some other choices for limiting the cache.