Hah, I got detention for a week for doing something fairly similar (booting Linux off external media). School's position was that if they couldn't spy on your computer usage you must be doing something bad.
Yeah, I got in trouble in my high school's computer class for booting Ubuntu 8.04 off a live CD. Probably would've gotten away with it had the machine's built-in (and therefore impossible-to-mute) speakers didn't blast the startup sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaEXZ-df6Y
Thankfully I got off with a stern warning and a "whatever you did, I can't see your screen any more, so you better fix it".
They netbooted XP on all the machines yet the images were full of spyware and AV software. The teachers would get a remote view of all the students screens in some tiled layout. Never really got the point of the AV software since none of them had local storage or connected to any shared drives (we were required to email stuff to ourselves).
The screen recorder was the primary burner of CPU time.
Plus side was that after this episode I was allowed to bring my own laptop. I had a guest account on the wifi which I knew logged all my DNS traffic.
Nah. These were new Core 2 Duo machines running so much enterprise spyware / anti-virus software that if rendered them nearly unusable. MS Office was extremely slow, IE 7 took 30 to 40 seconds to load pages.
OpenOffice and Firefox on a Ubuntu 10.04 LiveUSB ran laps around the stock software.
The positive outcome was that I was allowed to bring my own laptop to school after that. They even gave me an account on the guest wifi.
