OT: Altiris Virtualization Suite

Since this group has its share of phenomenal computer geeks and gurus, I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this software.

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There are free home-use keys available from the following website.

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The basic premise is that is software captures the installation information: registry settings, install files, etc., into an OS layer. When the layer is activated, the application shows up as being installed. When the layer is deactivated, it does not. Basically, the Windows registry is NEVER actually modified, but appears to be modified when looking through the SVS layer. Therefore, when uninstalling the applications there will not be any leftover hung up in the Windows registry, because they were never actually entered there. Also, as the big marketing spot elaborates, there are no conflicting .dll's because the software keeps track of each application's requirements in its own layer and it runs through that layer. By only activating the layers you want to use, you don't have all the overhead of everything else possibly running in the background or getting prefetched. This results in a cleaner computer with less performance loss over time. You know, the one where you have to Format C: every year and reinstall everything.

I just put together a new computer and loaded the Altiris software on it. I got around to installing Firefox and Thunderbird. So far so good. I tried Netscape Communicator with a few bugs, but it may be hardware related because by Sunday night I pulled the second hard drive, reformatted the first, and reloaded Windows and the drivers. Other apps like Quicken and MS Office seemed OK initially. I still have a lot more work to do and a lot more testing, that is, after I figure out what my problem was and reload everything again. I'm guessing it is a hard drive failure on my brand new Western Digital, or a MoBo failure for that SATA socket/port.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has heard of this software. Has used it. Or is willing to test it out with me in order to compare notes and lessons learned.

--Scott

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