There are a couple of computers at work which run windows 7 as their primary purpose. People sit down at them and draw pictures of things. Well, render pictures. They're dual boot, the idea being to use them for other things when otherwise they'd be idle.
This works quite well if the user restarts the computer when they're done image processing.
However people aren't especially motivated to hit restart before heading off, instead tending to stay logged in. Not necessarily saving their work before going home.
We could set an idle timeout and restart automatically, which would solve my problem, but infuriate the people who hadn't saved their work. There's also a chance of false positives, identifying a not-very-active user as one who has gone home.
Is there a version of sleep / hibernate / shutdown which would allow the computer to reboot into linux and do other stuff for a while, but which when windows boots restores the probably-unsaved work as if nothing had happened?
edit: I guess that's a no. Dumping the contents of memory into a file on disk then restoring from it doesn't sound unachievable, but nevermind.
This works quite well if the user restarts the computer when they're done image processing.
However people aren't especially motivated to hit restart before heading off, instead tending to stay logged in. Not necessarily saving their work before going home.
We could set an idle timeout and restart automatically, which would solve my problem, but infuriate the people who hadn't saved their work. There's also a chance of false positives, identifying a not-very-active user as one who has gone home.
Is there a version of sleep / hibernate / shutdown which would allow the computer to reboot into linux and do other stuff for a while, but which when windows boots restores the probably-unsaved work as if nothing had happened?
edit: I guess that's a no. Dumping the contents of memory into a file on disk then restoring from it doesn't sound unachievable, but nevermind.
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