Deep Freeze alternative (hardware) options

Hello 10 forums!
Title says it all, so I'll explain as good as I can, what it's going to be used for.

I'm in the Board of Directors in a (non profit organization) E-Sport Society in the city I live in.
We currently have Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends and Fornite during the week in the "E-Sports center" as we also call it.

We have members down to the age of 8 years old, and the oldest is around 30, if not more.
So we'd like a solution, where they won't be able to mess up a PC, and we have to spend X amount of time setting it all up again.
We've thought about adding all the PC's to a domain, the biggest issue would be, that some of the members never really used a PC before, so just logging into their own Fortnite account, is a hurdle, so we'd prefer not to make a bunch of accounts when it's already an issue.

So I've thought about something like Deep Freeze, and I've told there's actually a add in card you can use, that's called Reborn, that can do the same thing, and it's much faster than Deep Freeze, since it's dedicated hardware.

I can't think of a good solution of the time, so I'm asking for advice for solutions that can solve these obstacles, as well as guidance in general, since not everyone wants that solution.
I'm all up fro the domain and giving them a user each, so they can't mess things up, I'm just not sure if it's the right choice.

Does any of you have ideas, solutions, or similar experiences you'd like to share?

Used Acronis Try&Decide in early days , now using Shadow Defender , its a safe and not bloated program.............

pietcorus2 said:

Used Acronis Try&Decide in early days , now using Shadow Defender , its a safe and not bloated program.............

I've not heard of it.
How much does it impact performance?

Does not do any harm , so no harmfull changes of impact ..............works fine in Win10 also .
Its rock-solid , install , test your software , anything you want , copy things you want to keep to other partition , reboot.............done , nothing happened , all changes you made in Shadow-mode are gone............

pietcorus2 said:

Does not do any harm , so no harmfull changes of impact ..............works fine in Win10 also .
Its rock-solid , install , test your software , anything you want , copy things you want to keep to other partition , reboot.............done , nothing happened , all changes you made in Shadow-mode are gone............

I see.
Well, Deep Freeze is more appealing, since you can manage it all from a phone or a server. The price for 30 licenses is not appealing up front, since it's over €1.700 and that's quite a lot in our opening year.

Thanks this is what i was looking for.
Did you end up using Shadow defender? did you find another alternative?

Thank you for this 1 year old post lol

Redsalvs said:

Thanks this is what i was looking for.
Did you end up using Shadow defender? did you find another alternative?

Thank you for this 1 year old post lol

Good morning.
I've went for none of it. But what we're going with (I haven't had time to do it yet), is that we're creating an image with the games, drivers etc. on it that we can load from our storage server, so we can easily install a new Windows for the setups. We're also going to use a Windows Server for AD so we can restrict user from installing new software on it, without having a coach/teachers to type in their own password for doing it. Down the road, we'd like a software center you can install extra things from, Discord, Spotify etc. whatever they might use. Just not cheat programs, bloatware, in general bad software that we don't want on our PC's.

But as I said, I haven't gotten around to it yet since I've been busy with a bunch of other things down there, security amongs other things.

Nanobug said:

Good morning.
I've went for none of it. But what we're going with (I haven't had time to do it yet), is that we're creating an image with the games, drivers etc. on it that we can load from our storage server, so we can easily install a new Windows for the setups. We're also going to use a Windows Server for AD so we can restrict user from installing new software on it, without having a coach/teachers to type in their own password for doing it. Down the road, we'd like a software center you can install extra things from, Discord, Spotify etc. whatever they might use. Just not cheat programs, bloatware, in general bad software that we don't want on our PC's.

But as I said, I haven't gotten around to it yet since I've been busy with a bunch of other things down there, security amongs other things.

Woah. thanks for the reply. This route seems pretty elaborated. So making a custom image will be a better deal as you can re-install it as much as you need on each individual computer. I need to learn how to make custom images so i can probably do the same.

I was checking Shadow guard and they offer a 50% off for non-profits. i needed a few licenses. maybe i pay for the $500 and it should save me some time.


Thank again

I have used Shadow Defender for years. It still works well (in W10 2004), but seems to be abandonware.

" It still works well (in W10 2004), but seems to be abandonware."...........yes , using it still , VERY GOOD ! Never failed works fine in latest Win10 also , why ? should this be abandonware.......???
Wish the maker updated this fine software , been a long time ago.........

Used Acronis "Try&Decide" a few years ago , you could use it , if you want to reboot in Try-modus .
Not using it anymore , coz you have to install the whole ( bloated!) Acronis , sometimes it failed with system-errors also.......

Only thing I might try is VM-Ware , virtual machine .............