Cyber Cafe software and portable software

[webfork]

Having known a few coffee shop owners and discussed the possibility of setting up computers for public use, I spent some time looking into "cyber cafe"-type software, which basically means setting up computers for anyone to use. To this point, I've only been interested in recommending a computer without a hard drive that runs a Linux Live CD. Its difficult to hack, most problems are solved by rebooting, and there's never an issue of someone leaving something illegal behind on the machine. Because hard drives fail before other parts of the computer, its less likely to need tech support.

Today however I did some checking and found that there are MANY Windows-based tools that will run software found here on PFW, lock down a computer, and the cafe owner can make money. TrueCafe is one in particular that appears to have low system requirements and seems to allow the use of no-install software, but there are also shareware and freeware tools available (softpedia listing).

Has anyone had any experiences with this or able to make a recommendation?

[guinness]

Opera has a kiosk mode inbuilt into the main desktop application >> http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/ ... 595#p32595

But seriously HandyCafe is pretty good for handling a small Internet cafe of about 20 workstations, though the downside is the obtrusive advertisement to the right of the screen, but the software is Free!