We will probably see lots of announcements regarding Solid State Drives in the coming months and hopefully some huge price drops as well. As you might now I’m planning to buy one SSD for my soon to be build desktop computer to use it as my boot hard drive.

I think the problem that most users face at the moment is that many SSD don’t live up to the promise of faster speeds and that the new generation of SSD will deliver what they are expecting. It would be really awful to buy a 32 Gigabyte SSD for $600+ only to find out that it is slower than a normal 7200rpm SATA drive.

Harvey Liu, Advanced Media President. “The read rate of our 2.5″ SATA SSD drive provides users with a phenomenally fast speed. For instance, it reduces boot up and seek times to mere seconds, while installation of new software programs can be accomplished in seconds rather than minutes

Solid State Disks have no moving parts which means they make no noises whatsoever, have a largely reduced access time, are not prone to electro-magnetic failures, have a lower power consumption, no heat generator and a better ability to endure extreme shock.

Solid State Disks do have some limitations though. The most dominant ones are currently availability, pricing and capacity. The largest capacity of Solid State Disks is 128 Gigabytes at the moment which I have seen for sale for roughly $3800 (SUPER TALENT 2.5″ 128GB SATA Internal Solid state disk). More affordable units are 32 Gigabyte Solid State Disks (for instance the SAMSUNG 32GB IDE Internal Solid state disk) that retail for roughly $400 and 16 Gigabyte disks for $200.

My next computer that I will build next year will have one of those Solid State Disks as the main boot hard drive resulting in faster boot times of the operating system, lower noise level and faster response times. I will still use conventional hard drives for storage mainly because the pricing is currently way out of line. Reminds me of the good old days when a 10 Megabyte hard drive cost that much.

If the pricing drops to around $500 for 64 Gigabyte drives I would buy one of those instead but I’m perfectly fine with a 32 Gigabyte Solid State Disk as well. My current Windows partition has only 10 Gigabytes so even a 16 Gigabyte Solid State Disk would be fine.

This technology will be even more exciting for notebook owners. They could for instance replace their conventional hard drive with a solid state disk to reduce the noise level and speed up all processes.

This is great if you have some friends, family members or other guys who tend to break things or do stuff on your computer that you do not want. With Steady State you do not care at all anymore because all they do is gone after rebooting the computer. After adding a user, which can be imported if you are using Steady State on another computer, you can select either one of the pre defined security profiles such as High, Medium, Low, No Restrictions or Custom ones.

Custom ones are probably the most important ones because you get to control what the selected user can do in detail. These restrictions can be defined in the four tabs General, Windows Restrictions, Feature Restrictions and Block Programs.

The General Tab lets you specify a time limit for this account and select if you want to automatically reboot the computer once the limit has been reached. This one is actually pretty nice to prevent that your kids for instance access the computer longer than they are allowed to.

The Windows Restriction tab lets you hide drives and restrict Windows functions. This includes to block access to the task manager, command prompt and removing the run icon in Windows. This removes options for the user to make serious changes to the system, most of the time many of those options will have to be enabled if you want to secure your computer.

Feature Restrictions removes features from Internet Explorer, Toolbar and Microsoft Office. It is possible to prevent printing, remove tabs in Internet Options, and disable the macro menu in Microsoft Office.

The Blocked Programs tabs lets you block softwares that are installed on the system from being executed by the user. Many softwares are already in that list but you can also browse your system and add executables to that list.

The big question however is if Solid State is really securing the system to prevent clever users from accessing it. The answer is of course no it does not. It does help to protect your children and users who do not work regularly with computers. Everyone who knows how to work with Linux Live CDs knows how to break into a Windows XP system or use Linux to do whatever you would like.

The software checks if your Windows installation is genuine during installation.

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Microsoft Windows Steady State