Almost all malware now is installed by poisoned web sites. If you haven’t installed the latest updates for Windows / Office / Internet Explorer / Firefox / Java / Flash / Acrobat / iTunes / Quicktime, you’ll click on an innocent-looking link to find, say, lyrics to a Katy Perry song and be confronted by something unexpected – typically an official-looking window that pops up claiming that your system is infested with terrible diseases.

It can happen at quite legitimate web sites –click on the links for some info about how it happened to the New York Times and Grooveshark. There are hundreds of thousands of pages run by bad guys obsessed with fooling you into following one of their links to a poisoned site.

I’ve written about this frequently, and created this list of rules for safe computing. Let’s focus on the rules for dealing with these fake security screens.

Know the name of your antivirus software. If you get a security warning that does not display the exact name of your security software, it is phony; if you click on anything, you will probably install malware.

• The bad guys almost never use the name of a specific program, and they usually don’t exactly copy the screens from Norton or McAfee or TrendMicro or Microsoft security products. They create things that look vaguely official but use different names. Interesting question: why? The malware is created by international scum, global worms with no consciences. They’ll steal your money and give your credit card number to organized crime syndicates in Turkmenistan, but they get shy about copyright infringement? Seems odd. At the moment your best defense is to know the exact name of your security program, and recognize when you don’t see it on a phony security warning.

If a web site brings something up on your screen that might be malware, do not click on anything. If you click “NO” or “CANCEL,” there is a good chance that they lied and you actually gave permission to install the malware. Don’t click the X in the corner. Don’t click the Start button. Get your hands off the mouse!

If you have a window onscreen that might be dangerous, turn your computer off with the power button. You have better than even odds of stopping the malware from doing anything to your system, as long as you don’t click anything when it’s onscreen. Hold down the power button for 8-10 seconds until the system goes completely dead, then restart it. With luck, you’ll dodge the bullet.

Be careful out there!

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or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Google Chrome

I am conservative about installing software. I don’t want programs on my computers unless I intend to use them. The first thing I do with a new computer is remove unnecessary utilities and cruddy photo programs and the like installed by the computer manufacturers. I don’t install trial versions of programs until I’ve spent time learning about the programs and deciding if I’m genuinely interested. When I stop using a program, I uninstall it. I use a lot of programs but I have very few programs on my office computer that I don’t use regularly. It’s a recipe for happy computing!

Mozilla Firefox has been a stable, mature Internet browser for years. Nonetheless, I’ve generally advised people to focus on Internet Explorer unless they could articulate some specific reason to prefer Firefox. Most people want an Internet browser, nothing more, and Firefox and Internet Explorer are obviously duplicative – they’re both secure, capable Internet browsers. Enthusiasts and people under 35 can easily move between two duplicative programs, but for many people it makes more sense to have just one program that they use and understand well for a particular function, like Internet browsing. That way there’s always a consistent experience when links are clicked on; there’s only one interface to get used to; and there’s only one program to keep up to date with security patches.

In the last year I’ve had persistent glitches during my Internet browsing. They’re not frequent but things happen to interrupt the flow – pages will stop loading, or a script error window will pop up, or a YouTube video will freeze. Ironically, I began to have trouble loading many Microsoft pages that check Windows Live ID or Microsoft Partner credentials before they load.

Lately it’s begun to happen more frequently, a couple of times a day. A large percentage of my browser crashes involve pages with Flash displays (like YouTube), so it’s certainly possible that Adobe is the villain here, as is so often the case. I’ve done lots of tweaking and twiddling and updating and cleaning caches and other troubleshooting, with no particular improvement.

I couldn’t help noticing that Firefox worked flawlessly almost every time I tried it after being frustrated by an IE crash. Lately I’ve been looking at Google Chrome (recently updated to version 6), and it also flies through the pages that bring IE down.

It seems odd. IE has its critics, sure, but not even the most rabid critic would claim that it’s so fundamentally flawed that it just can’t play Flash videos reliably. (Well, I take that back. The most rabid critics would say that using IE causes brain cancer and Microsoft kills puppies for sport. Let’s not include those critics. IE doesn’t have deep structural flaws.) Other people aren’t flooding online forums with complaints that they get a Page Not Found message when they try to visit their Skydrive site. And yet, I had to believe the evidence in front of my lying eyes – using the other browsers was really making a difference.

That’s how I finally took the step of making Firefox my default browser, and putting all three icons next to each other down on the taskbar. More programs to learn, more programs to keep up to date – but when there’s a specific reason to use a program, then use that program.

If you’ve been frustrated by Internet Explorer crashes, try Firefox or Chrome. There are no guarantees that either of them will improve your life – most of the time when pages don’t load, the fault is at the other end of the connection and there’s nothing wrong with your computer or your connection. But if they work for you, use them with my blessing. Let me repeat the advice from earlier this year:

If you want to use Firefox or Chrome, you should use them. They are mature, stable and full-featured programs. There are two related things to keep in mind about security.

• Like any program today, installing Firefox or Chrome carries with it the obligation to keep them up to date. They are regularly updated with fixes for security vulnerabilities. They will only be safe programs if you install those updates when prompted by the programs.
• Installing Firefox or Google Chrome does not significantly increase your security against malware spread through poisoned web sites, despite what you read in articles bashing Internet Explorer.

Be careful out there!

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This week’s installment of Annoying Checkboxes is sponsored by Microsoft, which has already brought you the annoying checkbox to install the “Bing Toolbar” – the one that has to be unchecked every single time you install an update to Java. Since Java is updated approximately once every 72 hours, you’ve probably seen that annoying checkbox frequently. (If you open Internet Explorer and have a useless “Bing Toolbar” at the top of the screen, then you missed the checkbox.)

Now I’m training myself to watch out for a new Annoying Checkbox that turns up when Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 is set up on a new computer.

When you get a computer from Dell, you will likely order it with Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 pre-installed. That’s the suite with Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, and Powerpoint – just right for small businesses. It’s easier to have it pre-installed than to wrestle with buying and installing a separate copy to save $12 on licenses.

There’s a slightly different installation sequence with Office 2010. When you find it on the Start menu, the first screen you see pretends it has no knowledge that you purchased a license already. You pick from three choices: you already purchased Office, you want to buy it online, or you want “Office Starter 2010,” which – trust me – you don’t want.

You choose “Activate” and locate the piece of paper in the box with the license key (which is now being printed in letters that are three nanometers tall), and fight your way past every variation of “B” and “8” and “G” and “6” until it agrees that you have a valid license. You get the Install screen and you’re home free!

Microsoft Office installs itself beautifully. It removes every previous version of an Office program that’s included in the 2010 suite – no more version conflicts. It makes smart choices about the options to install. The entire set of installation files is copied to your hard drive so you never have to put a DVD in the drive later. Get ready to push “Install Now” and – wait! Do you see what they’ve done?

“Include a free trial of Microsoft Office Professional 2010.”

If you leave the box checked, you’ll install trial versions of Microsoft Access and Microsoft Publisher. You’ll get nag notices in 30 days about how swell they are and how important it is to pay more money to Microsoft to keep them.

It’s not a big deal. They can be uninstalled later. But why? When you chose Microsoft Home and Business 2010, you made your decision about those programs. You don’t want nag screens a month from now about trial programs you were fooled into installing. I think what bothers me the most is that it’s printed in really tiny letters. It’s not polite to install software that will generate popup advertising later, with no disclosure except something in really tiny letters. It’s obnoxious.

It’s not the end of the world, just an Annoying Checkbox. Don’t click OK until you look at what’s onscreen!

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Previously:
Fear of Exchange
Moving Mail Online With Microsoft Online Services

Small businesses should strongly consider having their Outlook mailboxes hosted on Exchange Servers run by Microsoft for a small monthly fee. I’m going to recommend this to a number of my clients and I encourage anyone interested to contact me to talk it through. I’d like anyone in a business with 2-20 employees to read this carefully!

For businesses currently running Exchange in an onsite server (usually as part of Small Business Server), the move to hosted services does not significantly change the experience of using Outlook. If, however, the onsite server is getting old, moving the mail to a hosted service avoids the risk of an expensive collapse if the Exchange database is corrupted or the server goes down, and reduces the cost of upkeep – no more Exchange security updates and upgrades.

Small businesses that are not running Exchange now can step up easily and cheaply and take advantage of the convenience and flexibility that Exchange brings to your mailbox.

FEATURES

• MULTIPLE COMPUTERS The same Outlook folders can be displayed on multiple computers at multiple locations. You can use your Outlook folders seamlessly from a desktop computer at the office, a desktop computer at home, and a notebook computer on the road, and Outlook is always up to date at all locations.
• MULTIPLE LOCATIONS Office workers will be linked together and share Outlook folders even if they are in different offices.
• WEBMAIL Outlook folders can be accessed online through Outlook Web Access – full access to all Outlook folders presented in Internet Explorer, like other webmail services.
• SMARTPHONES Android phones, iPhones, and Windows Mobile phones can sync email, calendar, and contacts over the air continuously.
• SHARING Calendars and address lists can be shared with other people in the office.
• SECURITY Microsoft provides virus and spam filtering.
• REDUCED COSTS Microsoft is responsible for backups, database maintenance, security updates, and upgrades.

MAILBOX SPACE

By default, each hosted mailbox is given 25Gb of storage space. File attachments can be up to 30Mb.

DOMAIN NAMES

The service works with mail to a business domain name, like bruceb.com. If you are using a free address from your ISP (e.g., att.net, sonic.net), or an online service (e.g., gmail.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com), then you’re not ready for the hosted mail service. In that case, though, think about whether it’s time for you to step up to a more professional presence for your business! It’s very, very cheap to begin using a domain name for your business. I’ll help you with that. It can be expensive to put up a web site (it doesn’t have to be, but it’s easy for it to turn into a big project), but it costs almost nothing to register a name and begin using it for mail.

Worth noting: changing the business mail requires changes to some records at the web host or registrar that has control over the domain name. Typically that only requires digging out a long-forgotten password. Occasionally it turns into a difficult exercise for names registered long ago by people who aren’t around any more. It’s always solvable but that’s one place for the project to take an odd turn.

COST

Five mailboxes cost $25/month, with a one year contract. Additional mailboxes are $5/month per mailbox. The minimum charge is $25/month, but at the moment there’s an odd imbalance in the market: Microsoft is undercutting everyone else on price, so this is the service to consider even if you only have two or three mailboxes to set up.

It’s worth noting that the Exchange services are sold separately but they can be purchased as one component of a bigger suite of services, including Sharepoint Online and Office Communications Online. In my experience small businesses tend not to use those because of the rather fierce learning curve, but you might want to at least look into them. The full suite is $10/month per mailbox.

There is some cost to setting up the service and migrating the existing mailboxes. That’s different for each business but it’s seldom very much. Talk to me and I’ll give you more information about how your migration might go.

CAVEATS

• Microsoft’s security requirement means a new password to memorize. The passwords for the service must be complex and they must be changed every 90 days. It’s an inflexible requirement that some people find annoying.
• BUT: Microsoft supplies software for computers running Outlook that sends the password whenever necessary. The only time the password is required is for Outlook Web Access – or when the password has to be changed.
• The password requirement means that the mailbox is very secure. Your passwords are your only defense against identity theft, financial loss, compromised computers, and breaches of confidentiality and privilege. I sympathize that you’d rather not have another password to remember but, sorry, folks – keeping your mail secure with a strong password is a selling point, not a problem.
• Microsoft’s spam filtering is inflexible. Microsoft only sends a spam report every three days. You can release messages individually but you don’t have access to a “safe senders” list – I have to go to an administrative control panel to add names to a white list if messages from some senders are persistently blocked. The filters are very accurate, so it has not been an issue with anyone that I support.

Think about this! If you’ve gotten a notebook or a smartphone and you’re frustrated that you can’t get your calendar or contacts on it easily, this is the answer. Call me for more information!

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Previously:
Passwords: computer login
Passwords: e-mail
Passwords: Google Accounts & Windows Live ID
Passwords: password managers
Passwords: online passwords and LastPass

Let’s go over a few facts of life.

No one is enjoying the need to have a lot of passwords. It’s hard to remember the passwords, of course, but in our complicated world it has become even harder now to understand when passwords are required or what they’re for.

I feel your pain but I can’t change the world. At the moment your passwords are your defense against identity theft, financial loss, compromised computers, and breaches of confidentiality and privilege. If you use a weak password, or if you use the same password over and over every time something calls for one, you are jeopardizing yourself and your business. Sorry. That’s the way it is.

Here’s an article by an expert speculating about how he’d hack your password if he was so inclined. I’ll quote from it but it bears reading in full.

Here is my top 10 list. I can obtain most of this information much easier than you think, and then I might just be able to get into your e-mail, computer, or online banking. After all, if I get into one I’ll probably get into all of them.

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. "password"
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth – yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. "god"
8. "letmein"
9. "money"
10. "love"

Statistically speaking that should probably cover about 20% of you. But don’t worry. If I didn’t get it yet it will probably only take a few more minutes before I do…

Hackers, and I’m not talking about the ethical kind, have developed a whole range of tools to get at your personal data. And the main impediment standing between your information remaining safe, or leaking out, is the password you choose. (Ironically, the best protection people have is usually the one they take least seriously.)

He goes on to describe what it means to use brute force attacks to crack a password, where special software tries repeatedly to log in to a site that is not hardened to resist such an attack. There’s a chart that shows how long it would take to crack passwords based on how long and how complex they are. Most of you have passwords that are all lower case, right?

Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters – like @#$%^&*). Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.

He adds one important extra point – all the time estimates are based on cracking passwords that are not dictionary words. If your password is a name or a word in the dictionary, it will fail under a simple brute force attack. It’s that simple.

There is a nice list of suggestions to make a more complex password – substituting numbers for similar-looking letters (0 for O, 3 for E), or adding capital letters, for example. Your computer and many web sites now allow spaces in passwords which opens up one of the most safe alternatives: use a phrase as a password. If your password is, “Use the Force, Luke!”, it will not be broken by a brute force attack.

The most important advice, though, is also the hardest to obey, which is to use a different password for each password-protected place in your life. That’s not easy but I want to remind you about LastPass, which can help make it easier to accomplish.

LastPass is a free program that memorizes each password typed into a web site and automatically fills it in when you return to the same site. Once it’s up and running, the master password for LastPass is the only password you have to remember.

Go back and read my article about LastPass. Then go create a free account and install it; and just as important, spend time learning how to use it. Watch the videos. Read the manual. This deserves your time. It is an essential utility.

Let me give the last word to the author of the article about password cracking:

I could go on for hours and hours more about all sorts of ways to compromise your security and generally make your life miserable – but 95% of those methods begin with compromising your weak password. So, why not just protect yourself from the start and sleep better at night?

…

Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the passwords you think matter least actually matter most. For example, some people think that the password to their e-mail box isn’t important because "I don’t get anything sensitive there." Well, that e-mail box is probably connected to your online banking account. If I can compromise it then I can log into the Bank’s Web site and tell it I’ve forgotten my password to have it e-mailed to me. Now, what were you saying about it not being important?

…

Now I realize that every day we encounter people who over-exaggerate points in order to move us to action, but trust me this is not one of those times. There are 50 other ways you can be compromised and punished for using weak passwords that I haven’t even mentioned.

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It feels as if the smartphone revolution has happened overnight. I am simply astonished at the number of business people and lawyers getting iPhones from AT&T and Android phones from Verizon. I rarely saw them in businesses a year ago – they were still perceived as gadgets, not serious business tools. Now it’s starting to seem unusual not to see them in everyone’s pocket.

The phones are capable of many wonderful tricks but almost everyone tries first to set up over-the-air sync of mail, contacts and calendar. It doesn’t always go well!

• Individuals who have fully committed to Google Gmail and Google Calendar have an easy time with Androids, but their lives are full of sorrow and pain if they get an iPhone without thinking ahead.
• Businesses running Small Business Server discover that it’s easy to set up their phones and completely satisfying – but only if their IT support person has installed a third-party security certificate so the phone will trust the server. (And the IT support person might have scary stories about Exchange, too.)
• And businesses running individual copies of Outlook retrieving POP3 mail quickly discover that they have no good options: they can get a half-baked flow of incoming mail to their new phone but messages sent from the phone will never show up in Outlook without a clumsy BCC: workaround, and calendar and contacts are nowhere to be seen.

It’s messier than most people realize.

Some businesses can and should cut through that confusion by moving the company mail system to hosted Exchange mailboxes run by Microsoft Online Services. Your mailbox lives online, on servers run by Microsoft, and your various devices each show you a picture of the mailbox. Your office computer, your home computer, your smartphone, any Internet browser – all of them display the same mail, the same calendar, the same contacts. A change anywhere is a change everywhere. Update a contact phone number in Outlook and you’ll see that new number on your phone a minute later. Reply to a message from your phone and you’ll see your reply in Sent Items in Outlook the next time you look.

I can understand your hesitation. The world of cloud computing is in a state of turmoil. Big companies – Microsoft, Google – are building up their infrastructure and developing their products, many of which are unfinished or at least raw around the edges. Many of the services planned by Microsoft aren’t ready yet: a whole SQL database platform that is still in development; consumer services that are going through long, drawn out beta testing. Nimble competitors – Salesforce.com, Rackspace, Dropbox – are sparking and fizzing with new ideas, and new companies are appearing at a dizzying rate. There are debates raging about security, there are wobbles in service. I can understand why you might feel cautious about jumping in.

Microsoft Online Services is the exception. It’s ready now. The hosted Exchange platform isn’t new; it’s been available for years and it’s been road tested, with 40 million customers currently being hosted all over the world. It’s secure and it’s solid; the occasional outage (most recently a two-hour outage on Monday morning before 9am) is frustrating but increasingly rare.

It’s not difficult to move a small business to Microsoft Online Services. I’ll tell you next about some of the requirements, the benefits and costs, and a few hidden caveats.

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I’ll be taking a personal day on Wednesday, August 25, to help my dad celebrate his 90th birthday.

My dad taught me to solder. Remember soldering irons? We’d use them to build Heathkit radios and test kits, painstakingly matching the colored bands on the sides of the resistors that we were soldering into little circuit boards and checking off each step in the directions when it was done. I was tremendously impressed when he built the family’s color television set. A TV set! How great is that! And he could fix it when it broke because, hey, he built it! Working with my dad on those Heathkits was the best way in the world for a kid to learn how to follow instructions carefully, and how to pay attention to details and get them right the first time.

A combat veteran, a salesman who rose to become president of the company, a proud father, and deeply in love with his wife of 60 years, my sainted mother. He knows how to carve a turkey. He can make noises like a seal and make kids laugh. This is quite a guy. I wish you could meet him. You’d like him. Everybody does.

Please, join me in wishing Warren a happy birthday – and forgive me if I’m slow to answer the phone on Wednesday. We’re having lunch at Bob’s Big Boy. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.

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I am pleased to announced a new service for my loyal clients: real-time server and networking monitoring.

This is the culmination of months of evaluation and testing. It represents a higher level of service that I’ll be delivering to my clients, at the same time that I’m helping reduce technology costs by handling problems before they turn into crises.

SERVER MONITORING

For less than $1 per day, I will set up 24×7 Round-the-Clock Monitoring that will check your server’s critical systems every fifteen minutes. Whenever it sniffs a problem, I’ll get an email showing the exact nature of the problem. That means I can fix it faster – and boost your overall uptime.

Every fifteen minutes, Bruceb Consulting 24×7 Server Monitoring will:

• Check that your server is up and running.
• Check that you can connect to the internet.
• Check your Windows Services, vital components of your server’s operating system.
• Check disk usage to ensure it’s below a set threshold.
• Check RAID devices to ensure that all disks are functioning correctly and data is safe.
• Check your backups to ensure that vital information can be recovered after a crash.

DAILY HEALTH CHECKS

My Daily Server Health Check monitors the most important aspects of your system each and every morning, ensuring everything is working correctly – and alerting you when it’s not. I’ll run a daily check of:

• Drive space change
• Physical disk health
• Hacker attempts
• Exchange Store database size
• File and folder sizes
• Event logs

I’ll send you a short start-of-day report – before you even arrive in your office – showing the exact problems if any are found. You can fix them yourselves – or you can ask me to help.

If I find no problems, I’ll still send you a short note showing that I have checked these critical systems and that everything is in order.

WORKSTATION MONITORING

For $1 per workstation per month, I’ll set up a similar monitoring system on each workstation in your network. I’ll get alerts if a problem develops during the day, and I’ll run a Workstation Health Check every morning and include the results in your daily report.

CLIENT PORTAL

If you subscribe to Bruceb Consulting’s monitoring services, you’ll be able to log in at the Bruceb Consulting website and see any issues that have developed, any time. I’ll supply login credentials so you can log in at http://dashboard.bruceb.com and view the current status of all your systems.

REDESIGNED BRUCEB.COM WEB SITE

This is a big deal! I’ve redesigned the bruceb.com web site to give you more information about the monitoring and reporting that I’ll be doing for you. There are fewer jokes but there’s lots more information. Go take a look around! I’m terribly proud. (Also tired. I hand-code the site in HTML because I’m not smart enough to learn CSS and modern web site design languages. This is as good as it gets.)

I’ll be contacting many of my clients in the next couple of weeks to go over this service. If you want more information and you haven’t heard from me, give me a call!

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I’m strongly urging my clients running Small Business Server to move their mailboxes to online hosted Exchange servers. I’ll give you a bit of background and tell you an anecdote to explain why Exchange frightens me, then tell you more about Microsoft Online Services next week.

Microsoft released the first version of Small Business Server in 2000. It was updated in 2003 and 2008, and a new version is planned for next year. It is a customized collection of several Microsoft server products, bundled up to be installed on a single server. The products are the same as the enterprise versions – with some simplified management consoles and controls (and a limit on the number of users), but otherwise identical to the full products. Small Business Server includes:

• Windows Server – domain controller for authenticating users and handling file sharing, printer sharing, and security
• Microsoft Exchange Server – mail server
• Internet Information Services – web server
• Additional components at different times and in different versions – Windows Server Update Services for update management, SQL Server for databases, Sharepoint Services for collaboration, and more.

For years Small Business Server was a compelling choice for small businesses with 25 employees or less. (SBS can support up to 75 people but it’s easy to outgrow it when there are more than 25 users.) There were no good alternatives for small businesses ready to step up from simple peer-to-peer networks. I worked with many companies that built their businesses on SBS 2003.

A mail server is essentially a specialized database. Exchange Server has been built to be a particularly robust database with an extraordinary number of failsafe mechanisms to make sure data is never lost. The same Exchange Server technology runs small businesses with fifteen employees and Fortune 500 companies with 64 million employees, or whatever they have these days. When Exchange Server is set up in a small business with fifteen or twenty mailboxes, it is under an absurdly small load compared to what it is designed to handle. It is very stable and runs trouble-free nearly all the time.

When Exchange Server breaks, it is a monster to fix.

Lots of people make a nice living doing nothing but working with Exchange, all day, every day. Every big company running Exchange has IT staff whose only responsibility is to keep it running. This Microsoft engineer took a picture of the books that he uses to support Exchange Server. These are just the books from one publisher, Microsoft Press! There are hundreds of books from other publishers, and untold tens of thousands of KB articles and white papers and other technical resources. People are certified as Exchange specialists of various types after intensive classes. It is a highly complex, difficult world unto itself.

I have been involved in five incidents where Exchange has needed to be fixed. On two of those occasions I tried to work on it myself before getting outside help. (I have my own Exchange books and a modest amount of knowledge about it.) On one occasion I spent many hours trying to recover lost data in public folders, then advised the client not to pursue it further. On two occasions I immediately reached out for help.

As a Microsoft Partner I can get enterprise level support from Microsoft in certain situations, including when an Exchange Server goes down. It is a remarkable experience! After a threshold call to establish my credentials and the nature of the problem, an Exchange engineer steps in, usually from India. Put your stereotypes aside! In my experience these are serious engineers who speak flawless English, are very highly trained, and do nothing but solve Exchange problems every day. They are prepared to stay on the phone for as long as it takes to fix the problem. Nobody goes to bed, nobody gives up – these guys are thorough and determined.

It takes hours. Hours and hours and hours.

Last week a hard drive failed in a client’s Small Business Server. It was not the primary drive with the OS; it had the Exchange database on it but not the transaction logs. Backups were being done with an Exchange-aware copy of Storagecraft ShadowProtect, so I was able to restore an image of the drive relatively quickly.

The Exchange Information Store would not mount. I tried some things, then called for help.

This was a relatively simple problem. It was a small database. We had the data, I just needed help to clean it up and get it ready so the database could be mounted successfully.

During the next three hours, we ran dozens of commands in a command prompt window, culminating in one monster that took three lines on the screen when we typed it in, before I hit the Enter key. Success! But success at a cost: hundreds of dollars for my time spent on the problem, and the risk that there would be some problem and the Exchange database would turn out to be fatally damaged. It would be even worse if we were also paying Microsoft or a specialized Exchange consultant for support.

That was the best case scenario – problem solved in only three hours (plus a couple more hours cleaning things up on the workstations) because it was a small database with no corrupt data to repair and a good backup. On another occasion I spent eight hours on the phone with a Microsoft engineer fixing a slightly more complex problem. I know people who have had longer sessions. That’s just my own limited experience with my own clients; there are lots of people with Exchange stories.

In the last five years, the mail system has become the single most important process running most businesses. If the mail system went down for my clients running SBS, it would be a calamity that would threaten the business. Lawyers and businesspeople live by their Outlook mailboxes. The calendars and contacts, the nonstop flow of email in and out – those are the things that drive our businesses and our law practices. The Exchange database is growing constantly. The server is working harder and harder to deliver ever-larger mailboxes.

See that server in the closet? You bought it in 2004 or 2005 or 2006. It’s sturdy. It almost never goes down.

But you know what? It’s getting old. Your closet is dusty. It’s hot in there. You’re working the server harder than ever. You’re hitting Exchange Server with mobile devices and laptops and home computers and more onsite workstations. Your mailboxes are getting bigger.

You’re betting the business that Exchange Server will keep running the mail system without a wobble.

I’m starting to get scared that something bad will happen. Hard drives fail. Databases get corrupted.

I want you to feel my fear.

Microsoft Online Services will host those Exchange mailboxes for $5/month per mailbox. There’s no guarantee that everything will be silky smooth but the responsibility shifts away from your closet and it becomes Microsoft’s problem to keep that database running, to keep the Exchange Server up to date, to set up redundant servers so the mail system is not interrupted by a hard drive failure, to do backups.

I’ll make less money if you move your mail online. One of the side effects of an Exchange failure is that I make a bundle of money. It’s a huge payday. Those hours add up fast.

So all of you, my loyal clients running Exchange Server onsite: take away that opportunity for me to get rich at your expense. Let’s get your mail offsite where it’s someone else’s problem!

Next week: more info about Microsoft Online Services.

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Here’s a nice notebook at a nice price: the Asus U43Jc, a 14” laptop that can be purchased from Amazon until September 5 for $999 – with a $150 Amazon gift card thrown in, effectively bringing the price down to $849. That’s quite good for a notebook with these specs!

The notebook features a cover and palm rest made out of bamboo, making the case look very sleek in a furniture sort of way. (It also lets Asus tout how environmentally swell it is.) It’s got great parts inside: an Intel Core i5 processor; 4Gb of RAM; 500Gb hard drive (unfortunately one of the relatively slow 5400RPM drives but that’s not uncommon in notebooks); and a nice Nvidia GeForce G310M video card. Reportedly the battery life is good. It weighs just under five pounds, which is standard for this size.

It inspired a Microsoft employee to write a note singing its praises on one of the official Windows blogs:

In the limited time I’ve had to play with the U Bamboo, I’ve been impressed by its beauty and brawn.  Mostly by its beauty, though; this is a PC that looks less like a computer and more like a work of art.

As with any new computer, you have to keep the cost of Microsoft Office in mind. It’s not included, so you’ll wind up spending another $130 for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 (without Outlook), or $225 for Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 (with Outlook).

I’m not going to give up my ultralight, ultraslim Dell Vostro V13 any time soon, but the Asus Bamboo is worth considering if you’re in the market for a notebook now. At the least let it serve as a reminder that prices are down on notebooks and the selection is dizzying.

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