I was planning on taking an old laptop (running Win2k and with a max
of 512 meg of RAM once I get around to swapping out a partially bad
unit on the notherboard) and using it for certain activities such
that it was likely to get hosed in various ways.

So I'm planning to image the HD, so I can restore it from darn near
anything.

Alternatively, I'll run a windows Live CD (yes, you can make such
things).

Either way, besides the purposes I had in mind, it'd be ideal for
these idiots.

Doing it with a bootable CD gets fun because they can't mess up the
OS files. They can mess up the temporary copies of some stuff on the
HD or in RAM, but so what. Next reboot they'd be gone anyway.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com