Auto reimaging main disk on startup

"I can suggest a couple of options, of varying painfulness.

If you absolutely have to re-image every time you start up then you may be wanting a copy of Norton Ghost, I think it has sufficient command line abilities to be able to make a batch script to restore a partition. The problem with this solution is that it could take anywhere from half an hour up to a few hours to re-image as your base image could be quite large with Win7. Similarly creating the image would be a laborious task too and would take a bit longer than the re-image.

I suspect what you actually want is DeepFreeze which would prevent any changes to your system being permanent so all changes get wiped on a restart. I'd suspect that there would be a mode/option to make changes permanent but I've never played with the softare. It is payware, but for what you get it looks a reasonable price (£22.50 GBP). It looks like you can get an evaluation version to test it out so I'd look at that.

A free version of Deepfreeze would be Windows Steadystate, but it is not compatable with Windows 7."

"You could use the built in Image Tool in Windows 7, or use Norton Ghost to create an Image at every boot. This would allow you to install software and have clean images, as an archive if you like.

The scenario could play out like this:

Install Windows 7
Install software
Install patches
Create first Image <-- Version 1 if you like

Then, every week or so, you could just pull the image out and recover the OS. Which leaves you with a clean computer.

If you want, you can also move the Users\YourUserAccount to D: Which would leave you the trouble with re-downloading, conversations, visual studio projects and what ever you have there.

So, let's say you want to install something, you could boot the clean image, or take one of those created while rebooting the system and install to that. Which then will give you a clean image with the latest installed software."