Yes, the software giant headed by one of the world’s wealthiest men is an easy target for bashing whenever we’re faced with issues involving our Windows based personal computers.  How many times have you exclaimed or heard someone exclaim in frustration, “Windows SUCKS!” whenever a computer runs into a problem?  It is probably a pretty frequent occurrence – I know in my line of work I hear it constantly.  The complaints that Microsoft can’t make a decent operating system.  The complaints that Windows just doesn’t work right.  The complaints that Windows crashes all the time….

I know a number of people that have sworn off Windows based PC’s and moved to Apple – adopting both their standard desktop O/S and their newer mobile device O/S as the base for all of their personal computing.  Unfortunately what I also hear are the complaints about these platforms as well.  Every piece of technology has its own list of pro’s and con’s.

Trust us, a hammer doesn't fix it...

The one thing that the now gadget champion Apple does get right and always has is the basic principle of – software runs better on good hardware.  In recent years, Apple has moved away from their old Motorola based RISC processing hardware sets to more industry standard and PC-friendly Intel processing platforms.  Yet, they still build their products on a more robust and sturdy hardware set and charge a premium for it.  Honestly, is their operating system and software set worth the $1799.00 starting price tag for a 15-inch MacBook Pro?  Not for the software alone – no it is not.  But they base their software ALWAYS on a robust, high-end hardware set.  Not just the latest names, but actually good, quality hardware.

Is that laptop with all the bells and whistles that you got on sale for $299.00 at your local big box store built on a robust, high-end hardware set?  If you think it is, I have some magic beans you might be interested in…

So if you’re not running Windows on good hardware, can you definitely say for certain that Windows itself is what is failing you, or could it be any one of the thousands of complex chips, devices or resident applications that have to run within Windows, dependent on that same hardware, that might be failing you and causing those blue screens?  Should Microsoft really be responsible for making their operating systems to ensure they work with every piece of hardware that comes pressed together by $.12 per day workers in Asian 3rd world countries?

I say no.

After all, Windows XP Pro has been running on my IBM ThinkPad for 4-years now and daily, I have no complaints about how my laptop works.  My desktop in my office runs constantly and is rebooted less than once every other week and is error free daily.  Solid hardware = good O/S performance.  Windows is Windows regardless of the PC you put it on; the hardware makes a huge difference.

Why are graphics workstations so expensive?  Because they are based on some of the must rugged and well made hardware in the industry.  Why do they need to be?  Because multimedia application for video, audio and graphics editing are brutes when it comes to system resources.  High-memory allocation and repetitive tasks that tax the hardware even more than the operating system.  This is the same reason Apple systems are lauded as being ideal for graphics professionals.

Getting the picture?  No pun intended, of course.

So the next time your computer blue-screens, before you start cursing Microsoft Windows as being the ruination of all things computing, think about the computer you’re actually using.  And if it was a discount special from your local big-box store, remember your current feeling of frustration the next time you go out to buy a new computer.

You don’t have to spend $1799.00 just to get quality – but if you spent $299.00 I can assure you, you got the level of quality you paid for.

The Easiest Target is a post from: @ Blog

Here is what else we see as a result:

• Unrefined business processes that cost time rather than save it, because time wasn’t spent on learning an application properly.
• Poor technology platform choices because the only person consulted was a 16 year old nephew that knows what technology is cool, but not necessarily what technology works for business or how to implement it.
• Poor technology performance, due to cutting corners on vital, required items such as PC hardware specs and maintenance, Operating system maintenance, security and anti-virus or internet access services, and centralizing critical data on a server or network storage device.
• Time and money lost due to inadequate printing devices and no management.
• Improper file storage and no backup or recovery solution.

One of the main things that wastes time and money is either ignoring problems until they snowball into issues, or setting untrained, inexperienced employees to the task of managing the business’s IT and with no budget to do so. Not only do they not have the training required to adequately manage and make good IT decisions, but the task of problem solving takes them away from their primary roles – the role they were hired for – which can have a negative impact on productivity throughout the organization and less visibly end up costing the company a whole lot more than a qualified IT consultant or contractor would.

Storing critical data on your Best Buy bargain laptop? Yeah... that's why they're not called Best Plan.

Lest we ignore the biggest disaster waiting to happen; leaving back-ups in the hands of the employees themselves. If your job was painting houses, would you use ladders or stand on the shoulders of your employees? And when there is a failure, what is the plan to recover from it? A single hard drive failure could potentially put a business out of business.

What is the simple solution? Treat your IT as it deserves to be treated and put it in the hands of professionals. The technology industry moves fast – let a company that keeps up with those changes advise you in what changes would work best to improve your business.

Not everything is a do-it-yourself project. Some of life’s necessities need to be handled by a professional, or the results could end in disaster.

Is your business headed for an IT disaster?

What IT Means Today is a post from: @ Blog

In the past with film based cameras, you took the film in for developing and got prints. Although prints have a shelf-life too, most of us would put them in a box, in a cabinet and break them out every few years trying to find that one special one, right? They might be vulnerable to the perils of time and disaster, or improper storage – but the only one of these perils digital can protect against is the peril of time, and even that is debatable. After all, who says that today’s digital graphics standards will be accepted or used in 50 years? The industry does move fast.

NAS devices such as this one from Buffalo Technology can store several terabytes of data and is easy to use.

It is a pretty safe bet though that your average digital device will still be able to open those vacation pictures from 2010 in 2110, so time might not be the biggest peril. What is the biggest peril is the failure of the memory device you keep your pictures stored on.

Think of it this way – the device you stored your pictures on takes the place of the negatives in the days of film. Most of us don’t print every picture – one of the many conveniences of digital photography – so if your storage device fails and if your data isn’t stored correctly, your pictures or the ability to print your pictures is lost forever.

So how do you avoid this? There are several ways:

Live storage – if you edit and clean-up your photos, your live storage can exist on the PC or another PC type device. This makes it convenient to open the images, work with them, email them or share them out on sites like Facebook. Although the pictures can reside here for as long as you want them to, assuming you have the storage space for the images and all of your other necessary files, this should never been the only location.

External PC Storage – as a general term, this would be a hard disk drive attached to your PC, whether it be a USB connected drive or a spare drive inside of your desktop PC. Traditional hard drives have a life expectancy of 2-5 years (and I personally don’t trust them beyond three) so this should not be relied upon as the only back-up.

Many tower chassis PC’s have room for multiple drive inside of the case and have the feature functionality allowing for multiple spare hard drives in a RAID-1 configuration. This would mean two hard drives tha mirror each other, giving you two exact copies of the data on them. This is a great idea – if one drive fails, the other still retains the same data and can be copied to a new drive. We would suggest this option if you work with your photos often and you require a large amount of “live” images.

Solid-State Storage – Now available for a higher cost are Solid-State Drives. These are Hard Drives, but they are memory based drives without a spinning platter and mechanical read-arm. Solid-state drives are more reliable and less prone to failure due to vibrations or drops, but significantly more expensive currently than standard hard drives. A solid-state drive can be installed into an external hard drive case and connected via USB for a very reliable desktop storage solution for both archiving and maintaining “live” images.

Removable Media – USB flash drives and other removable media such as secure digital cards, although they can still become corrupted or fail, it is much less common than with mechanical hard drives. With the price of all memory products dropping all the time, images can be archived to this media and stored in a fire-proof safe in order to protect a copy of the images long-term.

Optical Media – Very cost effective and easy to use, we recommend images being archived to DVD-R or CD-R media. Optical media has a shelf life of 100 years, or more. If kept clean and scratch free, it provides a great media option for keeping a non-volatile, long-term archived copy of the images.

DVD-R media can get a little flaky if the disk is written to full capacity. We recommend limiting a DVD-R archive to 3GB or less per disc.

Network Storage – A NAS (Network Attached Storage) device can provide a very reliable and convenient way to manage, access and share your images and other media files. A NAS device, similar to the RAID drive example mentioned above, can make use of multiple hard drives to keep redundant copies of your data, protecting it if a single drive in the device fails. These devices are easily configured for access by any computers or other devices on your home or small office network and many even come with a web-based access feature so you can access your files from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.

Internet Storage – An excellent way to keep your data safe from premise disasters that can threaten anything stored locally (fire, flood, natural disaster). There are some online storage vendors that will provide up to 100GB of storage for only about $100 per year – typically anything beyond a small-office sized storage (250GB or more) will cost significantly more and remember, at a typical broadband 1Mbps upload rate sending all your images to an online storage center could take hours, if not days.

What is our recommendation for the typical home user? Consider using an online storage service, but at least keep your images backed up to a NAS device and archive them to DVD-R or CD-R media. Make sure you keep multiple copies of the optical discs (they’re cheap enough, burn a few when you make them) and keep the discs on a shelf. Just like the old days, you can always take the DVD off the shelf and look through them, and reminisce about all those good times!

Backing It Up is a post from: @ Blog