Dell released a new laptop today. It used to be the case that Dell was a couple of years behind the rest of the world in design, because it seemed they focused more on building computers as efficiently (and cheaply) as possible and less on designing the computers that everyone wants to have. Why else do you think everybody pays a premium for Apple laptops (more than half of i.t.NOW employees are proudly guilty of this)? Because, simply put, the design is amazing. Everything works and feels amazing. You are continually amazed by the simplicity of the product.

Dell definitely realizes the importance of design and has made some fast improvements. The Dell Latitude E4300 I blogged about earlier is my personal favorite, but the new Adamo released today attempts to compete with the Macbook as far as Design goes. From the looks of it, they appear to have done a good job. I am only going off of pictures, but here’s what I like about the design:

·      Edge to edge screen. Personally, I can’t stand the black border surrounding the new Macbook screens.

·      Incredibly thin (.65 inches)

·      Solid state only on the hard drives

But, nothing is perfect. I think that the Adamo designers fell into the same trap that the first generation Macbook Air fell into. They compromised too much on performance to fit everything into a small, sexy package. The second generation Macbook Air fixed that problem (for the most part).

Now I just need to find a customer to buy one so I can try it out!

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Hello, my name is Craig, and I am addicted to Google Analytics.  I feel better having said that. If you aren’t using Google Analytics for your website, you are missing out on all the fun. Why might you ask? Well, what’s the point of having a website if you don’t know how people are using it?

 

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When I first heard the term cloud computing, I thought it was just putting your server in a data center and accessing it from anywhere. This is a similar concept, and has its benefits. About a year ago we lost power in our office for about 3 hours. All of our servers were in-house, connected to a big UPS battery backup that lasted all of about 20 minutes. We rely heavily on our servers to report the status and health of our clients’ networks, and to provide remote support and maintenance. It was an awful feeling. I started sending people home where they at least had internet access, but without our servers, it did us no good. It was then we decided we needed to make some changes. We started pricing power generators and special air conditioners. These just weren’t realistic, and still had limitations. We moved all of our critical servers to a datacenter. Redundant power, cooling and internet are just what we wanted to be able to work from anywhere. Even if our office has no power, we can find an internet connection and get to work. Now we host several client servers at our datacenter, so they can have the same benefits.

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A couple of years ago we decided to dive into the world of server virtualization.  This is an amazing technology that allows us to run multiple operating systems on a single server. One server can act like many.  Microsoft servers run better when their tasks are focused. Take a mail server for example.   You wouldn’t want your mail server to also host your data files, database, web site and terminal server.  Maybe you have a program that doesn’t play nice with others.  Before virtualization, you would need to purchase a separate server for each of these tasks to have an ideal environment.  I’ve seen plenty of servers overloaded with tons of applications by clients trying to stretch their server dollar. Heck, I built some of them.  Servers can get expensive, especially when you need several.

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i.t.NOW is a Microsoft Shop. We support Macintosh, Linux, VMWare, and various other platforms, but the vast majority of our clients are running Microsoft servers and workstations. Our office, as well, is mostly Microsoft. Even down to the smartphones that we use. However, I stand alone with my Blackberry. And, sorry Microsoft, I am never going back.

I recently bought a new phone, since my Pearl had worn out (or at least that is the excuse I gave my wife). It is only available from T-Mobile right now, the Curve 8900 (or Curve II as some people call it). Switching over to the new phone reminded me why I love my Blackberry. Before I drove to the store to buy my Phone, I logged into our Blackberry Enterprise Server (personally, a must if you are going to use a Blackberry with Exchange) and set my activation password. As I was finishing the purchase, I put in my old SIM card, and activated my phone with our Enterprise Server. By the time I left the store, my new phone had pulled down all of my contacts, my calendar, my email, and my tasks. Not only that, it had set up my speed dial, and even the custom settings I applied to the buttons on the side of my phone. Plain and simple, it just works. That is more than what I can say for any of the dozen Windows Mobile smartphones I have used in the past.

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Have you ever been so mad at your computer that you scream? Admit it, we all do. This video proves that screaming at your computer might not be the best thing.
 

Without being too geeky, this person is measuring the speed of the drives and when he screams at them, there is a peak showing latency, or slower response time.

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If I’d asked anyone what a thousand gigabytes is called 10 years ago, they’d look at my like I was crazy.  No one could even fathom that much storage. 

A few months ago, Seagate announced the worlds largest desktop hard drive, 1.5 TB.  That TB means terabytes, otherwise known as 1,500 gigabytes, 1,500,000 megabytes, 1,500,000,000 kilobytes, you get the idea.  To put this in perspective do you remember those 5.25" black floppy drives?  It would take 2,343,750 of those disks to equal the size of this new harddrive.  Assuming they are 1/8" thick that would make a stack 292,968 Inches tall (That is 4.62 miles or 24,414 feet).  All this storage has been compressed into a rectangle that is only 1" thick.

That’s a lot of storage.  But is it really?  Do we need that much space on a desktop computer?  Why not?  Storage is cheap compared to what it was just a few years ago.  My first PC had a 10 megabyte hard drive.  That means I could store 10,000,000 characters of text.  Ten million wow!  Sure sounds like a lot until you compare it to todays world-that would barely hold 2 music downloads. 

I was lucky though, most PC’s in the late 80’s didn’t have hard drives at all, just a 5.25” floppy drive.  You’d put in the operating system floppy to boot up, then insert your program floppy to load the program you wanted to run, then insert a data floppy if you wanted to save what you were working on.  All this fit into 640 kilobytes of memory.  Pretty impressive in its day. 

In 1980, a 10 mb hard drive (just the drive, not the computer needed to run it) went for $3400.  Fortunately I got mine used from the university for $50 several years after.  We live in a digital age.  Almost anything can be stored in 1’s or 0’s; music, photos, videos, documents, you name it.  And it all takes up space.  And if its important 1’s and 0’s, like babies first steps on home video, it needs to be backed up, requiring more storage. 

I’m a fan of using a PC as a media hub in the home.  I will store all the kids DVD’s on my PC’s hard drive so we don’t have to worry about scratching or loosing disks.  These movies, uncompressed can take up to 8GB of space each.  With the introduction of Blu-Ray movies, these can take 50GB of space.  While these movies could be compressed, you loose quality in picture and sound.  I prefer to leave them in their native format, I don’t want to loose a single Pixar pixel.  My music is all stored on my hard drive and can be streamed to any room in the house.  Photos going back 10 years since my first digital camera are stored on my hard drive and can be easily brought up on the big screen for slide show night.  We never pull out photo albums anymore, and if it isn’t digitized, it gets lost.  So who needs all that space?  I’m certainly glad to have it.  Who knows, in a few years I may be boasting the benefits of my petabyte drive, amazed I used to fit it all in a few terabytes.

Terabytes in use
•    Wal-Mart's data warehouse in Middletown, Connecticut contains 500 terabytes of data as of 2004.
•    The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that "as of May 2008, the Library has collected more than 82.6 terabytes of data"
•    Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 terabytes of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.
•    LaCie released the world's first 1 TB external hard drive in early 2004.
•    Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte internal hard drive in 2007.
•    In 1993 total internet traffic was around 100 terabytes for the year.  As of June 2008, Cisco Systems estimated internet traffic at 160 terabytes per second.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte
 

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A few months back we had a client’s network compromised by a former employee, stealing information for a competitor.  This network had a high end firewall, an encrypted wireless network, and security measures in place to prevent something like this from happening, yet it still happened. 

It happened because people don’t like to remember a lot of passwords.  I can’t say I blame them, I think we’re all guilty of using the same password all over the place sometimes for years.  Unbeknownst to me, everyone in this company new the boss’ password.  It’s the same password he used on everything, which forced him to let others know what it was so they could do things like configure the security system, login to web sites, setup the phones, etc.  This ex-employee used that password to login to their system after he was released, and downloaded critical data he used to better his position where he was working for a competitor.

I showed him how to change his password after this employee was let go, which he did.  However, putting a “1” at the end of the existing password in my mind doesn’t constitute a password change. 

I can’t stress enough the importance of complex passwords.  Sometimes we will setup a new server for a client who has never had passwords before, and they complain like crazy that I’m forcing them to have a password to sign in, especially complex ones.  To them I say, “wah.”  A complex password must include 3 out of 4 character types: uppercase, lowercase, numbers or symbols.  If you are using a password that doesn’t meet these requirements, I suggest you change it.  Hackers can perform what are called dictionary attacks, where a program will automatically try every word in the dictionary with your username, attempting to get to your data.  Complex passwords aren’t in the dictionary, and are harder to crack with other types of attacks as well. 

If you have a server in your office, changing your password can be easy.  Simply press ctrl-alt-del all at once.  If you see a change password button, click it and follow the instructions.  For machines without a server, the password can be changed in the control panel, under the users section.  It is especially critical for server based networks, as one password could protect access to your machine locally or remotely, as well as access to email or other data. 

Don’t put it on a sticky note underneath your keyboard either. 

Its not difficult to make an existing password meet complexity requirements, just change a lowercase letter to uppercase, through a symbol at the end, and your password becomes complex, and hopefully you can still remember it.  Changing it at least every 6 months or so is not a bad idea either.  Even if you don’t think you’re data is worth protecting, think of the damage it could do in the wrong hands.

Top 7 password mistakes:

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“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” - Albert Einstein 

For those of you that are following the blog, you may be interested to know that I am writing this post from my new Latitude E4300. Overall, I am fairly impressed with the combination of speed and portability. Usually you have to sacrifice one for the other. But I will leave that review for a different post. For anyone who has purchased a computer from I.T.NOW in the past year, you will truly be amazed by my next confession. I am running Vista on my new laptop. I also must confess that this is my third attempt at converting to Vista. Rumor has it that there is currently a pool going on at I.T.NOW betting on when I will switch back to XP (email Jason if you want in on it).  So why do I run Vista when I tell all of my customers to steer clear of it? I guess it is just one of the things I have to know. I can walk anyone through pretty much all functions of XP without having a computer in front of me, so it is time to achieve that same level of familiarity with Vista. That and when I try to install XP on my laptop, the solid state disk appears to cause a blue screen, in spite of how many things I have tried (and I have sadly tried several times).

So, what am I doing differently this time to ensure that I get a different result and don’t go insane? Here are a few tips for those of you who for one reason or another are on the Vista bus.

·         Don’t complain about it in front of your Mac friends. They will just talk to you about the latest “I’m a Mac” commercial and make you regret your decision.

·         Feed the beast. If you don’t have 4GB of memory, upgrade. If you don’t have a video card, consider adding one. If you can use a faster hard drive (10,000 RPM Raptor or a Solid State Disk), you won’t regret the price.

·         Unvistafy Vista. Part of what makes Vista more secure than XP is all of the extra layers of security, which means you have to click a lot more than you would have to on an XP machine. The technician in me has to warn you that this will make Vista less secure. But you wish you had XP, so this isn’t that big of a deal. Wired Magazine has a great Wiki on some steps you can take to clean up Vista.

·         Relax. In less than two years, you will get to do it all over again with Windows 7

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As computers progress and get cheaper, it is often easier and cheaper to replace a computer than it is to fix it. Some of our clients aren’t used to this approach. Many have been using computers since they cost $5,000 and are accustomed to maximizing the investment by getting as much use as possible out of the computer. Here are some of the reasons I give when I tell clients their money would be better spent replacing a problematic PC older than 3 years:

• Productivity. Almost everyone who gets a new computer talks about how much faster it is compared to the old one. For business owners, that means your employees can be more productive, and hopefully make you more money.
• Data protection. While it is always good to test your backup strategy, doing so by experiencing a failed hard drive is not what I would recommend. A 3+year old hard drive is in some cases a ticking time bomb. It is much easier to replace a computer before the hard drive dies.
• New programs and features. Often times, companies contact us when they have a new program they want to install that won’t run on the computers they are currently using. This means that if they want to run the new program, all computers need to be upgraded or usually replaced.
• Warranties. As a machine gets older, it is often more difficult to find replacement parts for some components. By being covered by a manufacturer’s warranty, we can typically receive all necessary parts next business day, free of charge.
• Budgets. When you drive a computer until the wheels fall off, it is difficult to predict what the expenses will be. Computers often die a slow death, requiring on-site visits to replace failed components and employee downtime. If a company decides to replace all computers every three or four years, it is easy to plan in advance, before yearly budgets are created, which machines will need to be replaced during that year.

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