Technology In Check

I’m still surprised that many people continue to disparage Vista mercilessly. Having just installed Vista SP1 yesterday, I’m now onto my 12th month of running Vista with comparatively few problems. The biggest difficulty I’ve faced in my own experience comes from attaching external hard drives; if I plug in a USB hard drive, and try to use it too quickly, my PC will sometimes blue-screen. Sometimes.

And after I spoke with a friend this last weekend, I heard more about how Vista is “a bad thing”. Continue Reading »

I was visiting a client his week, and I came across a situation that I’ve seen a number of times. They were running a relatively new version of some software, but they were behind a service pack level (they were running service pack 1, and the current recommended level is SP2).

I was thinking about this a bit, and it occurred to me that this is a tendency I’ve seen a few times previously; a tech support provider feels that things are stable and working properly. So why bother to upgrade to the latest service pack? After all, it might break things, right?

Not always. Continue Reading »

I’m going to continue along the thread of Software as a Service that I started last week, and tell you about a problem that’s developed with one of the more common service offerings. The problem relates to online backup services, sometimes referred to as remote backup.

The basic premise is simple… as a business owner, you want to ensure that your data is backed up safely, and that it’s stored off-site. So you subscribe to a service to do this for you. The service you subscribe to enables you to select data that is sent encrypted over the Internet, so that it’s kept elsewhere in case something bad happens to your office premises. Everything is peachy-keen, right?

Maybe it is. Then again, maybe not.

Update: CPG Systems has started  doing remote/ online backups. Visit their website for more information

Continue Reading »

Many people are throwing around the ‘R’ word lately, at least in relation to the US (Canada in general, and BC specifically seem to be doing pretty well lately). Yes, I mean recession. Whether or not there is a recession is something for accountants and other financial types to decide, not me. I’m just a geek.

However I would like to talk about how you, as a business manager, can get the most bang for your IT buck during tougher financial times. Whether you’re directly affected by economic developments, or if you’re simply caught in the crossfire, here’s a few ideas on handling the tech side of things. Continue Reading »

Much has been said over the years about the pros and cons of telecommuting, and yet for some reason many business managers still feel a great deal of resistance toward the notion. As a professional geek this is something quite baffling to me. Especially in light of a recent article that reported on findings of several studies on the subject.

Managers know how to do the cost analysis, so I won’t go into that here. Instead, I’m going to spend a few minutes discussing some of the variables affecting remote users from a technology perspective, so that business managers can make a decision from a more informed position.

Continue Reading »