macdavid pro

I regret being slow to talk up this product earlier, but have you ever used a library, school, or company computer and wonder why and how after making changes on the computer, at reboot everything is restored to it’s state prior to use? Well, most likely they were running Deep Freeze or the like. But in any case, Deep Freeze provides this very functionality.

Deep Freeze Mac provides a completely non-restrictive working environment where there is no need to be concerned about system damage or corruption; a simple restart eradicates all changes and ensures that the standard system configuration is available at all times. All changes to a computer are temporary for that working session, including installation or removal of software and application preference configuration.

Now I don’t know about you, but this makes perfect sense to me. In fact I don’t want to get into any technical details about this software as I did install the evaluation download and using it is fairly straight forward, if you’re already in the habit of using data preservation tools. But for clarity’s sake, let’s say you bought a brand new shiny Mac, you install all your additional software and customize it’s settings and features to suit you. Now, obviously over time Macs and PCs alike age, wear and get corrupt preferences, system file errors, and the like. In order to to preserve the perfect functioning of you computer you install and selectively “freeze” the operating system (OS) and software areas of your computers hard drive in their present pristine state. So no matter what you do or what happens from when your computer decides to get screwy, it will always be fixable with a simple rebooting of the system. This is flat-out awesome!

As far as IT professionals are concerned, it works perfectly and is tailor-made, as a matter of fact, for large computer environments with a small IT staff and small budgets. It saves on time-effectiveness in terms of not having to restore and re-image several hundred (more or less) computers repeatedly, especially with high computer usage on daily basis. In fact, this personally hits home for me as I have a friend who is also my coworker as our “IT Guy”. We love him and appreciate everything he does because, first he alone is the IT staff, and his daily duties are staggering.

I checked out the list of key features that this software has to offer and it’s no doubt long, so I will only point out some features that I think are worth mentioning here as a selling point for both standard use (single user) and business/education (enterprise) use.

• Guarantees 100% workstation (computer) recovery on restart
• Provides password protection and complete security.
• Protects multiple hard drives and partitions.
• Compatible with Fast User Switching [such as, switching between different user accounts on a Mac]
• Supports SCSI, ATA, SATA, and IDE hard drives [support most hard drives, in other words]
• Offers silent install option for rapid network deployment
• Provides options to deploy on multiple workstations as part of a master image

Finally, Deep Freeze runs on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac OSX, Windows Server and Linux), but recently an updated version of Deep Freeze was released along side the launch of Apple Inc’s new OS update, Snow Leopard.

If I were to rate this software on scale of five stars, I’d give this all five.

Please read more, download and even consider trying out the 30-day trial software at Faronics.com

Ms. Contino, you have my deepest apology.