SoundByte Tech Blog

BT Infinity for Business - just make sure you bin the router

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:37:00 +0000

We have had hells delight this week with a BT infinity customer install. BT installed the new modem and PPPOE router on Thursday. The router looks like a domestic 2wire unit, but with a cable connection rather than an adsl modem built in. It has BT Business Hub written on the box but that's about the only 'business' thing about it.
The BT engineer got me to demonstrate that the internet was working (using my laptop because he didn't have one) and then left. No matter that it was on the wrong subnet for the rest of the network.
I then configured it so that it would co-exist with the server and all other devices and tested the connection again. At this point you realise how dire the 2wire router is. It's possible to set up custom services and port forwarding, but you do so through an interface that is so poorly designed, it takes far longer than it should.
When finished it suddenly becomes clear that there's no option to back up the settings that you've just put in - none whatsoever.

Unfortunately a day later the infinity line went down and BT helpfully demanded a hardware reset on the router - wiping out the settings completely. This wasn't the fault and they weren't interested once the modem was connected again. The router and port forwards had to be configured all over again.

So, if you're installing BT Infinity for Business then please factor in the cost of a proper PPPOE router in to your costings, because the one BT provide really ought to go straight in the bin.

CES 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 17:28:00 +0000

By the time you read this, the Las Vegas gadget fest that is CES 2012 will probably have been and gone. Microsoft, who have been keynote speakers at the show for the last 15 years, have announced that this may be their last show. Competitors Apple are not there this year, because they’re not there any year, preferring it seems to hold their own launch events.

If we’d followed last year’s show trends slavishly, then we’d all be using a (non-Apple) tablet and have 3D TV. Instead of books, we’d use an e-reader and quite possibly not the Kindle but one of the many ebook alternatives.

In the tablet world nothing has so far touched the iPad. At the 2011 show there were more than 100 alternative tablets displayed but of the ones that made it in to production, none has become a household name. In fact the word ‘tablet’ seems only to exist in the techysphere – iPad’s don’t get called tablets – it’s an iPad, obviously.

I was rolling my eyes at 3DTV in 2009, when half the stands at the Gadget Show seemed to be pushing it. In 2011 CES was full of it again and I still don’t understand it. Yes, Avatar probably looks fantastic in 3D but I can’t imagine it’s going to add much to Time Team. Besides, I already wear complicated glasses in order to see the screen – why would I want to wear two pairs.

So what’s new at this year’s show? Well nothing from Apple as they won’t be there. Microsoft will be talking about Windows 8 no doubt, but since it’s almost certainly not going to launch until the autumn it’s a little early. There are likely to be Windows phones on display, especially with Nokia’s conversion, but there are many commentators that believe this battle is already lost to Apple and Android.

One sector that has grown and will be on display is the new PC format, the ultrabook. There have been attempts to define ultrabooks as a new concept, much as Netbooks were defined a couple of years ago. But ultrabooks are essentially a really high-end laptop that’s been conceived to compete with the Macbook Air. Attractive though the Air undoubtedly is, there are real obstacles to adopting a Mac in a largely PC based organisation. Without an alternative, IT departments have been forced to shoe-horn Macs in to their corporate environments. Now, with high-end and very thin alternatives from Sony, Samsung and many others it’s possible to have the Macbook Air look but with a Windows operating system – and CES is likely to be full of them this year.

Finally, a technology that I’ve spoken about before is the Smart TV. The internet connected TV will offer the ability to browse and interact with on-demand services. It’s a natural progression from services such as iPlayer, LoveFilm etc and it’s no surprise that this year will see the technology incorporated in to a lot of new TVs. There is speculation that Google will use 2012 to enter the market with their own Google TV. Apple, indeed, may also launch their own service – but not at CES, because they won’t be there.

Thirty years of mobile computing

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 14:58:00 +0000

With the launch this week of the new Kindle tablet as a potential rival to Apple’s iPad II, it’s worth reflecting
that portable computing has travelled some distance in the last thirty years. In April 1981 the Osborne 1 personal (and portable) computer boasted a 5” screen. Unfortunately, this was surrounded by a couple of feet
of chassis, although Byte magazine’s reviewer at the time was “..impressed by it’s compactness; it will fit under an airplane seat.”.

The unit came with twin floppy drives, no doubt partly dictating the dimensions of the design. It had no
internal hard disk storage.

A year later and a new company, Compaq Computer Corporation, was founded. Their first product was allegedly sketched out on a placemat in a Houston Pie shop and would become the first portable PC.

Later that year, from a company that we now associate with printers, the Epson HX-20 was launched. It only had a 4 line display, but being no larger than an A4 sheet of paper and capable of running on batteries it is widely regarded as the first commercial laptop or handheld computer.

Much as we are seeing a race to market of tablet machines today, 1983 saw the development and launch of a
number of portable computers, from Tandy, Commodore and others.

A large US Air Force contract in 1987 led to a rush to develop new laptops. Zenith Data Systems eventually won the order and supplied over 200,000 units, but the tendering process had brought hardware from IBM, Toshiba and NEC to the market.

The first battery powered portable Mac appeared in 1989, with the rather obviously titled ‘Macintosh
Portable’. It was almost 4” thick and with it’s lead-acid batteries, almost 16 pounds in weight. The unit was
really a ’luggable’ rather than a portable, but it was soon followed by the first Apple Powerbook (1991) which was the first unit to have a palm rest and a trackball.

From there on the development of the laptop progressed with faster processors, the change to colour screens
and improved batteries. Wifi, generally regarded as an essential component to laptop use, didn’t appear until
August 1999. The term Wi-Fi was suggested by a marketing firm called Interbrand Corporation that had been hired to come up with a name that was "a little catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'".

Whilst the 90’s saw the laptop market mature, the benefit of hindsight lets us spot the development of the tablet market during this time. In 1993 Apple launched the much ridiculed Newton. A stylus controlled PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) that never really succeeded and was dropped five years later. In 1998 Fujitsu brought out the first colour touchscreen and in 2001 the Compaq Tablet PC helped popularise the
term ‘tablet’.

Many of the tablet machines that were produced in the years following the Compaq launch used a rotating/folding screen and a stylus. This allowed the unit to be used as a standard laptop when a proper keyboard was needed, but also as a stylus driven tablet with the screen facing outwards. With the current interest in tablets we’re starting to see the need for a proper keyboard repeated and devices such as Acer’s Transformer with it’s detachable keyboard play to this old requirement. What sort of portable devices will dominate in the coming few years is still unclear, but portable computing is nothing new and a great deal of change has happened already.

Kindle 3

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Tue, 17 May 2011 06:21:00 +0000

There are many devices that have multiple functions now. It’s perhaps inevitable as manufacturers try to differentiate mature and similar products. My digital radio offers to play MP3 and my toaster wants to warm croissants, but all too often these enhancements detract from the original or core function of the machine.

As of Friday I am the proud owner of a 3^rd generation Kindle, the e-book reader from Amazon. Quietly proud perhaps, in a slightly embarrassed way because I like books and though I’m quite a long way from an avid reader, I do understand the appeal of real books – especially old books in an old book shop.

But the Amazon device is appealing too. If I am wary of the idea, then I do like the execution. I had heard quite a lot about how ‘readable’ the device was and I had already downloaded the kindle app to my HTC phone though this is little more than a gimmick because the screen is so small.

In your hand the kindle is about the size of your average paperback, but is very thin (.34”) and it’s about the same weight as a 300 page book too. The screen size is 6” across but it’s not like a laptop or tablet screen. For a start it’s monochrome and it’s not backlit – so you can’t read a kindle in the dark. It’s an LCD display, giving you the curious effect of leaving an image on the screen when the unit is switched off.

There are two main versions to choose from; the wifi only or the wifi and 3G unit. You need to have some way of downloading the books to the unit. If you have a wireless network available, either at home or work, then the wifi unit is probably all you need. The 3G version allows you download content through mobile networks around the world but costs around £40 more.

Since you only use the wifi when downloading to the unit, I suggest you switch it off when you’re not using it. This will give you a battery life of a month – yes, it seems incredible when a mobile phone can run out of juice in less than a day. Charging is completed though a power or usb connection.

So what can you use it for? What the Kindle does best is allow you to read books which have been downloaded from Amazon’s extensive library of over half a million titles. You can read webpages on it, but it’s not very good at that and it won’t give you colour or videos. You can read PDFs and RSS feeds using services such as Kindlefeeder and this works ok if not well, but essentially it’s an ebook reader and that it does very well indeed.

It’s not a replacement for a book it just another way of reading a book. The technology takes some getting used to, but I’m now in to the second chapter of a proper book (downloaded from Amazon’s free selection) and I’m starting to forget how I’m reading and get involved in the book itself.

Taking the tablets

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 18:50:00 +0000

There is one development this year which will dominate computer use for the foreseeable future and that’s the rise of the tablet. I don’t own an iPad and neither did I feel any strong urge to rush out and buy one. But I have played with one several times and I can see the appeal – they are very playable-with.

I don’t have time now to get bogged down in my views of the iPad as a device or, god forbid, Apple as a company, but the format will – I suggest – be big. The iPhone introduced us to touch screens and Microsoft had to respond by trying to bring touch control in to Windows 7. Now all smartphones worth their salt use capacitive touch screens.

Once you use a touch screen for control it’s only a small leap to lose the keyboard. Without the keyboard you lose the laptop’s clamshell design and the device can be a variety of sizes. Apple are brilliant at marketing and design and have brought the iPad in at a price that makes it very difficult for other companies to compete – but that won’t stop them trying. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is too expensive – but technically it’s a good match for the Apple and the smaller screen size (it’s 7” instead of 10”) has some advantages.

We will get more tablet offerings this year from just about every major laptop manufacturer and quite a few phone manufacturers too. The launch of the iPad 2 recently does look a little like a spoiling tactic by Apple and it really is all about tactics. By getting the iPad2 out before the major Android rivals (announced but not yet launched) and by including a performance increase and cameras they have removed any edge the Android tablets might have had, which is why Steve Jobs was so bullish in his recent launch presentation.

So should you dive in now and get an iPad2 ?

You should consider whether you want to wait for the iPad 3. This is could launch as early as this autumn – perhaps with a significant technology change to the screen. Also, these are interesting times – with Android Honeycomb devices hitting the streets in the coming months you’ll have a chance to compare a whole range of new devices against the Apple hardware.

If you haven’t bought one already then you’re not the sort of person who gets hypnotised by the Apple marketing machine or you do, but you don’t have a spare £350 lying around. The new iPad has cameras but still doesn’t have a USB port. You need another computer to use it and you have to buy applications through iTunes – that is, everything that Apple will allow.

Tablets will be a huge part of everyday life. Much as I’d like to play with one, I have no need for one yet. This isn’t because I’m surrounded by tech, but because I’ve not been convinced what they’re for.

Once you know what you’re going to use it for, you’ll know which hardware to use.

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:58:00 +0000

Websites and Blogs

Getting a website for your business is on that essential list that includes business cards, letterheads and brochures and it’s now quite rare to discover an enterprise that doesn’t have one.

But having a website written is almost always expensive and can be ultimately disappointing, as a new proprietor often underestimates the amount of work (and therefore cost) behind the corporate websites that we use every day.

Faced with this cost, many owners will decide to create their own site. But web design, like any design, is a skill and a predominantly artistic one at that. If you have an aptitude with graphics and are technically able to translate your ideas on screen then you’re fortunate. If not, then the danger is that you’ll create a site that looks amateurish and will create a bad impression as a result.

So the third way is to use an online website creation tool. Your first port of call should be your domain hosting company. If you don’t have a domain name registered then you’ll need to do this and large providers such as 1and1 (www.1and1.co.uk) and 123reg (www.123reg.co.uk) both offer good and straightforward web design tools that don’t need any technical or graphical skill.

If you don’t have the option of a tool provided with your host, then you can still get a free site. Services such as Wix (www.wix.com) create highly graphical brochure sites and look very impressive, especially if you can add a selection of your own photographs. You are limited to a few pages, but the effect is much better than most beginners could create from scratch.

The other problem with websites for small businesses is the knotty problem of updates. It’s essential that the website has up-to-date information and ideally has specific product or service info rather than just generalisations. That means that you’ll need to make changes to the website or request changes from whoever has written it for you, whenever your products or prices change.

In addition, it’s nice to get more up-to-date information online, such as case studies, testimonials and special offers. Once customers learn that your site changes on a regular basis, they’ll return to find out what’s new and these updates need to happen regularly – every month would be good – even every week if you have something to say.

But changing a website every week is a bit of an undertaking – we certainly don’t make changes more than monthly. For a more immediate interaction with customers we use a Blog. Blog sites are generally simpler than a website, typically presenting as a single page with perhaps a margin showing contact info and previous blog entries. This allows you to type a page or less about something of immediate interest to your visitors – how you’ve handled a particular customer problem perhaps or details of the latest technology in your field. It feels much more like a conversation and it’s no more difficult to do than writing an email.

Blog sites are generally free and are easy to set up. Visit ours at soundbyteresponse.blogspot.com for example. You can link to your blog from your website or perhaps it could even be your website – showing potential customers how you’re already helping others just like them.

What's in a name

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 18:59:00 +0000

A few years ago there was a Microsoft advert where a young entrepreneur is shown running a business from a sparsely furnished office, to the obvious amazement of his newly employed assistant. He manages to present his organisation as much larger than it is with the help of a Windows PC and the latest Office suite of programs.

Obviously it’s an advert and there are lots of elements (and not a few dangers) in making your organisation look larger than it actually is. All small businesses want to present a professional image, but need to do that whilst controlling costs. It still amazes me, however, to see businesses using clearly un-businesslike email addresses.

It’s fine to use a hotmail, btinternet or AOL address for your home email. After all, these are not organisations that are likely to disappear overnight. But there’s nothing that screams one-man-band quite as loudly as a free email address.

Fortunately this is not one of those cost conscious decisions. If you accept for a moment that acmediggers@hotmail.com is not as good an address as john@acmediggers.co.uk then I’m going to point out a few more benefits.

By using a ‘proper’ address, you inform the customer of your website address. Even if you only have the one computer, you may have other staff that interact with your customers and they can have their own addresses. You can also add addresses for departments – ok, at the moment you may not exactly have a customer service team, but is service@acmediggers.co.uk such a daft idea?

If you’re still with me then let’s look at costs. The bit of an email address after the @ sign is called a domain name. All domain names are unique to the company that owns them, so if you’ve just launched a business called Bob’s Building Contracts then you’ll be disappointed to hear that bbc.co.uk has already been taken. I’ve known businesses choose their trading name based upon the availability of a domain name.

A .co.uk domain name with hosting will cost you from about £2.50 per month. Hosting gives you the name (such as bobsbuilding.co.uk), some web space (for your website) and storage for your email (usually 5-20 mailboxes to start with). That’s £30 a year for goodness sake. If that’s too steep, then just buy the domain name and have you email and web traffic forwarded to your current email provider. That’ll cost you about £3 per year.

Also when you choose your domain name, choose wisely. This is a big a deal. You can’t have extra dots and you can’t have spaces and domain names are not case-sensitive. I suggest you read your proposed email address out loud and see how it sounds. The process of choosing a name can be soul destroying as you find that your 1^st, 2^nd, etc choice is already in use. Don’t let this divert you in to strange spellings or punctuation – read bobs-building-contracts.co.uk out loud and you can see that it would be better without the hyphens. Domain names can be long – especially if shortening them loses the meaning (bobsbcs.co.uk).

Having a domain name for your business is essential. Changing email address is inevitable, but you can run both addresses alongside each other so it needed be painful. It’s not just about being presentable – it’s also aspiration for your business as it grows.

Sandy Bridge

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:33:00 +0000

We used to get very excited about the processors that formed the beating heart of our desktop and laptop machines. When I say ‘we’ I mean those of us constructing those machines and the buying public who, in those few days or weeks of frenetic technical comparisons before a purchase, get caught up in the choices with us.

But it’s rare now to build PCs from component parts. Laptops have passed desktops as the preferred format and DIY laptop construction never really took off. There are still PC builders constructing machines this way – and admittedly we still do occasionally for very high end machines – but it makes little sense for the majority of customers. The variety of specifications available from established manufacturers makes a nonsense of making a unit yourself, unless you do it out of an interest in computers.

A result of this is the way that we’ve lost sight of the age old battle between Intel and AMD. Currently we tend to compare Intel processors with each other and fall back to AMD when trying to save a few pounds.

Looking back at the last year or two, we’ve become accustomed to comparing lines of Intel chips, rather than their relative speeds. Dual Core beats Pentium, Core2Duo beats Dual Core and Core2Quad is best. We might look at the corresponding numbers that accompany these ranges, correctly assuming that an E8200 is faster than and E6750 – but wouldn’t bother to discover that both chips use the same clock and bus speed, but the higher one has more cache.

Then Intel release i3, i5 and i7 – muddying the waters as ever and keeping the existing chip lines as well. Core i3 still had two cores and was designed to replace the Core2Duo as Intel’s entry level processor. The i5, curiously, has either 2 or 4 cores and the core i7 has 2, 4 or 6 cores – no wonder the detail gets lost when you are buying a new machine.

So after weeks of exhaustive research and having just decided that you’d like your next laptop to have a Core i5-7xx Lynfield processor – assuming you can find one that has such a beast fitted – Intel calls a press conference and announces Sandy Bridge.

Sandy Bridge is just another ‘codename’ – we don’t tend to use the designations once the hardware has been released. Sandy Bridge is Intel’s development name for the 2^nd generation range of Core i3, i5 and i7 processors for desktop and laptop machines. The sticker on the unit will still say i3, but the speed designation will have changed from 3 characters (i3-xxx) to 4. Whilst the names stay the same, this is a major release from Intel, with much of the graphics processing being integrated on to the chip. Where in the past on-board Intel graphics have been dismissed as poor for performance, this new architecture looks set to reduce the requirement for separate graphics processing.

Operating Systems and the year ahead

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 19:53:00 +0000

Sometimes, amongst all the hype and hyperbole, you need to go back and look up some real numbers. This is certainly true when you try and find out what’s happening with PCs and Operating systems. Our workshop started to do repairs on Mac’s during 2010, though we don’t do many. Fans of Apple would point to the single Macbook between rows of Windows laptops in our workshop and claim this as evidence of the brand’s reliability. A look at the market share figures for operating systems, however, would suggest a simpler explanation.

In November 2010, Apple’s OS X operating system was running on 6.22% of the world’s computers. (source: StatCounter) . Windows XP or later was running on 91.99% of machines – a ratio of about 15:1 . But Mac’s are more popular now aren’t they? It is true that the popularity of Mac OS X has increased over the last year, from 4.96% in Nov 2009 – an increase of 1.26%. In the same period, Windows has dropped 0.75% which suggests that Apple has ever-so-slightly stolen margin from Microsoft – but at a rate (and with some admittedly schoolboy mathematics) that would take till 2044 to reach any sort of parity.

So assuming that nearly 92% of you are running Windows, which version are you (or should you) be using? We know, generally, that Windows XP still dominates (51.77%) though the take up of Windows 7 has been rapid and generally successful. Over the summer, Windows 7 overtook Vista and it’s now on just under a quarter of all machines. Vista is now down at 16.1% and this will drop further as its users recognise it for the dud that it undoubtedly is and upgrade to 7.

Windows 8 is expected to go in to Beta next summer and a release would then be reasonable around the end of 2011 or early 2012. Mac OS X Lion (we’re on “Snow Leopard” at the moment – do please try to keep up) is scheduled for release in ‘summer 2011’ – which is as precise as Apple wish to be at the moment.

The other big release of 2011 will be that of Google’s Chrome OS. This is not the Chrome browser, which is excellent by the way, but a whole Operating System that you use instead of Windows (or Mac OS X). I have a BETA copy installed on a memory stick and it does work – sort of – and it looks like.. it looks like a browser. It’s a bit like walking up to one of those kiosks in the airport where you can use the web – but only the web. You can do almost everything you do on a normal PC but it takes a moment to understand how.

Will Chrome challenge Windows or Mac OS X ? –Well yes, a bit – but that’s quite a mountain to climb. Netbooks tried and failed to get us to use an operating system other than Windows. There are other Linux based machines in use out there, but at just 0.78% of the global market they’re no more than a fringe element.

Cyber Attack

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:23:00 +0000

On December 3^rd 2010 the BBC website carried the headline “Cyber attack forces Wikileaks to change web address” and went on to describe in layman’s terms how DNS servers translate domain names in to IP addresses. What seems to have been taken as read is the term ‘Cyber Attack’ and how this might cause a website to be shut down.

In the following weeks it was reported that supporters of Wikileaks had launched their own Cyber attacks in an attempt to close down the operations of Paypal and Barclaycard. In some articles they named these as Distributed Denial of Service attacks or DDOS.

First of all, the Denial of Service bit is easy enough. If your local bank has a single phone line and a disgruntled customer chooses Monday morning to ring up continually and complain, then the line gets jammed and genuine customers are unable to get through. But if the bank has multiple lines, then our attacker has to persuade some friends to help him, calling from various locations at the same time – this is what’s called a Distributed attack.

In the reports concerning the Wikileaks story, the suggestion is that the DDOS attacks were made by supporters of the website (though working of their own accord). In our analogy they decided to call the bank – they were aware that they were doing it. But in many cyber attacks the perpetrator is completely unaware that they’re making the call.

So how is it done then?

When you type a web address or send an email, you use a computer resource at the destination. Converting the phone line analogy, the bank’s network and systems respond to your request. If you send a lot of requests, they respond a lot of times – utilising bandwidth on their network. Bandwidth (the rate of data transfer) which they can handle, is a finite resource. Too many requests will ultimately overload their networks and cause them to crash.

How much is too much? Well this depends upon the size of the organisation and its own defences, but if you could persuade say, 500 like minded individuals to attack at once then even a well-connected network would struggle. Getting 500 like minded individuals might not be too difficult in the world of social networks, but persuading them is not the only option available.

Many computers get infected with viruses and the majority of these viruses are Trojans. A Trojan (or Trojan Horse) is a piece of software installed on your machine. It may purport to do something useful and that’s the reason you downloaded it, but it’s already contacted its creator and now it’s sitting and waiting for instructions. Some Trojans are invisible but they act the same.

These infected machines (your machine) is then just one part of an arsenal for the cyber attacker to use in his DDOS attack – he doesn’t have to persuade you – he just co-opts your machine and thousands like it at a time of his choosing. Big organisations will have to deal with their own defences, but you can only prevent your own machine from taking part by having effective anti-virus software (ideally incorporating a firewall) and a suspicious regard for software that you download from the net.

You've no business being offline

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 21:39:00 +0000

I know I’m not alone in worrying about the impact a loss of Internet connection would have on a business. We’ve worked on a number of different scenarios to try and mitigate the effects of internet downtime for several of our customers – often after a total failure brings home just how important a continuous broadband connection has become.

How would your business be affected by the unexpected and prolonged loss of broadband? The loss of email, both in and out, is perhaps the most obvious difficulty. If you have a simple email configuration, then inbound email will probably build up at your ISP ready to be downloaded when the connection comes back. If you have a server, you need to be sure that email is not rejected, but is stored whilst your server is unavailable. This is by no means a given – it rather depends upon how you’ve asked for email to be configured.

Browser use is now entwined through so many aspects of the office that it’s difficult to define the impact of downtime. Obviously online banking and ordering is not possible – but what about preparing quotations without access to manufacturer or supplier websites. Many courier sites also require internet access for shipping purposes – so it may be difficult to despatch orders.

Remote workers are, clearly, unable to connect to the office. In server environments their diaries and email are frozen in time and phones are similarly degraded – reverting to their original function. If you have embraced the new technology of the cloud then the situation is even worse. How would your office function without access to any email history, contact lists or appointment diaries?

If this scenario sounds scary, then finally you should consider the response time for an identified BT line fault with your broadband line. Having identified and agreed the fault (with your ISP, which itself could take you more than 24hrs), BT’s service level agreement is for a 48hr response. That’s 2 additional days without any of the above. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

So, if that’s the problem, then the solution has to be redundancy. Not in the bad sense, but in the Blue Peter here’s-one-I-prepared-earlier sense. Put in a 2^nd broadband line and use a different ISP, connect and configure a 2^nd router to it, but set up for your network. Have a clear switchover procedure, not for 10 minutes downtime but ready for when you’ve been told it’ll be down for some time – and understand how your email arrives and is sent and how to make the changes necessary to ensure that email continues to flow. It won’t protect you from an exchange-wide failure but it’ll cover almost everything else.

Overkill? A broadband line will cost you around £47 per month, including the line rental. If you’re not convinced then I suggest you unplug your router for an afternoon and see the impact of no email or browser access on your office. I guarantee it’s a no brainer – but it may take a real failure to make you realise it.

Papa’s got a brand new squeezebox

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 17:12:00 +0000

When I attended the Gadget Show last year I tried to get my head around the complexities of audio streaming.

I am not surrounded by gadgets at home but I have for some time wanted a better way to listen to music. This because there are limitations to a standard stereo just playing CDs which are not easily searched or catalogued. The result is that only a small number of titles are listened to, with the vast majority being forgotten. Also, downloaded music has to be copied to CD or played via another device. Then consider the rise of online services such as Napster and Spotify. These offer almost unlimited access to music for a small monthly fee but have to be accessed via a PC.

After much research I decided to use Logitech’s Squeezebox Duet system. Physically this comprises a receiver box which connects to your stereo and a remote control with a built-in colour screen. It costs around £230.

So what does it do? Well, your original stereo still handles the playback of your CDs, but if you take the trouble to copy them to your PC then you can also play them and any other music that you have on your machine. This resolves the problem of access to your existing CD collection. The squeezebox is compatible with Amazon and iTunes, so if you buy music online you can also play that through your stereo.

This is all done through the Squeezebox remote, where you can also access internet radio stations and, more importantly, connect with online streaming services like Napster. If you’re not aware of Napster, then I should explain that it’s an online repository of music for you to listen to, well, online. They have over 10 million tracks as well as their own radio stations. For a £5 per month membership you get unlimited access to this catalogue and the benefit of 5 free downloads per month (to be used on an MP3 player for example).

So with a Napster account in place, you are able to listen to a huge collection of music, including all the latest releases, without having to buy them and it’s quite legal. You could do this by connecting your PC to your Hi-Fi and using your PC screen but in many ways this is inconvenient. The Squeezebox does a good job of masquerading as a piece of hi-fi equipment and with the remote sitting next to the hi-fi the complexities of wireless networks and internet streaming are all but forgotten.

It’s not without its problems. I have found that it works best if you can hardwire your PC and the Squeezebox to the router rather than using wireless and the setup, even for a dyed in the wool techie like me, was far more problematic than it should have been. But that said, it’s possibly the best way to listen to almost unlimited music through your hi-fi.

Free Ink Cartridges

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:27:00 +0000

Our year end stock take has identified a number of ink cartridges that are still new and boxed, but are beyond their best before date (some by quite a long way).

Rather than throw the ink away we thought we'd pass it on free to owners of the following printers.

Canon

BJF850, BJF860, BJF870, BJC520, BJC750, BJC 8200, BJC3000, BJC3010, BJC6000, BJC6100, BJC6200, BJC6300, BJC6500, S100, S200, S300, S330, S400, S450, S4500, S800, S820, S820D, S830D, 9100, 9000, 9500, 9100

Epson

Stylus Photo 810, Stylus Photo 820, Stylus C42, Stylus C60, Stylus C64, Stylus C70, Stylus C80, Stylus C82, Stylus D68, Stylus 440, Stylus 480 Stylus 500, Stylus 680, Stylus 740, Stylus 790, Stylus 1270, Stylus 810, Stylus 900

So if you own one of the following printers then you are welcome to come and collect this ink (one printer model per person) from our workshop in Wellington Street.

www.soundbyteresponse.com for directions.

Individuality

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 14:22:00 +0000

Individuality is great isn’t it? It would be a boring office if everyone’s desk was the same, bereft of family photos, postcards from friends and aggressively name-marked staplers. So it’s no surprise that many PC desktops are the equally personalised.

It starts with the desktop background picture and screensaver choice. Then the icons are moved around and widgets added to show the weather and the time in Sydney. Then a neighbour tells you that Firefox is much better than Internet Explorer, so you download that and make it the default.

Adobe player gets installed and with it a McAfee thing that doesn’t seem to do much but asks you to update every time you switch the machine on.

Then someone emails you a picture and you can’t view it, but with a quick Google search you find a bit of shareware that solves it for you. What with the software the bank insisted you install and some extra bits that came with your printer, the icons at the bottom of the screen are building up.

And this is how it continues. Useful shortcuts are placed on the desktop, plus a few files that only you use and are easier to find right in front of you. You speed up your work by saving your critical passwords and building up a list of favourites.

But then one morning, your machine refuses to switch on.

It’s not a problem, because although it’ll take a couple of days to fix, you can borrow a colleague’s machine in the meantime. At least it shouldn't be a problem, but his machine is different from yours. He uses Google Chrome and his email software is not the same. There are lots of icons on his desktop but none of them match yours and those documents that you use every day are in the back of the support company’s van, along with the rest of your machine. You can’t get shipments out, because no one remembers the password for the courier’s website and the bank won’t let you log in until you’ve downloaded their security software again. As a result you’ve lost an afternoon already and if the unit has to be replaced it’ll take you days to get a new unit up to speed.

You be forgiven for thinking this is another piece about backups, but it isn’t. If the machine is repairable and it’s not a disk problem, it’ll come back just as it was. But in the meantime you’ve spent a couple of days struggling to operate, with a corresponding effect on the business.

You wouldn’t organise other tools this way. Strictly identical workstations are difficult to achieve and therefore rarely seen but general policies about browsers and other local software are sensible. Including standard templates and shortcuts allows company-wide procedures, even if the office has only two or three desktops. This avoids lost data and lost time and will also cost you less in support time as your IT support company can rebuild a unit quickly by comparing it to another.

PDFs and the road less travelled

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:23:00 +0000

This week my laptop decided to stop opening PDF documents, which is a pain because almost every bit of documentation I download from the web is in the ubiquitous PDF format. As always seems to be the case with these things, it coincided with a customer visit that involved a good hour trying to get to the problem of printing problems from Adobe.

The Adobe Reader software that I, and no doubt millions of others, had installed was version 9.1 . It seems I was on version 6 for ages and then suddenly it was 9.1 with not so much as a wistful glance at 7 and 8. But this version was giving my customer all sorts of difficulties and so I’d downloaded and installed version X for him (why X rather than 10? – why have they gone all Roman suddenly?). This resolved his problem, so this evening I uninstalled the Adobe Reader and did a quick Google for “Adobe Reader X download”.

That’s when I did that typical Google thing – the obvious road is straight ahead of me but I notice an interesting looking alley and head that way instead. In the search results was a link to a blog about the admittedly irritating Adobe download manager and I had to agree, the download manager is irritating. Then I remembered the considerable time I’d spent with my customer, fighting to do with Adobe 9.1 what he’d been doing with Adobe 8 quite happily before.

So after considering the broken reader on my machine and how Adobe always seems to be installing updates (If it’s not Java updates it’s Adobe – but I only have the reader installed and I only use it to ‘read’ things – so how many updates can there possibly be?) , I began to contemplate whether I needed Adobe at all.

A few of the search results talked about a free reader called Foxit (www.foxitsoftware.com) and as the reviews were reasonable I downloaded it. It’s relatively quick to download and install and it had no problem reading the same document that Adobe 9.1 was collapsing over. If you need to create your own PDF documents then it makes a good companion to CutePDF Writer (www.cutepdf.com) , a free PDF writer acts as a printer. The Foxit Reader installs and runs the same way that Adobe did and in the short space of time since the changeover, works well.

Whilst we’re on the subject of free stuff, then you might take a look at a utility called Belarc Advisor. ‘Taking a Belarc’ has been a stock piece of advice for almost as long as we’ve been fixing machines and if you’re a curious type then this little utility is for you. Downloaded from www.belarc.com it’s a utility that displays the hardware configuration and installed software on your PC. Most usefully it shows you the memory slot layout and also the license keys for the main pieces of software. You can print the results and it forms a useful snapshot to be filed for future reference.

Email templates in Outlook

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 07:25:00 +0000

If you run Outlook 2007 or 2010 for your email, you might be interested in this feature for creating and using email templates.

Sometimes you have to send customers a standardised response, to an email brochure request perhaps or a formatted email such as an order confirmation. The standard and rather

convoluted way of doing this is to use forms within Outlook to collect the required information. But Outlook offers the ability to save a message as a template, in much the same way as you’d use templates in word.

So let’s step through this. The screen shots are from Outlook 2007 but the principal should be the same in 2010.

First of all, create a new email .

Note that I haven’t filled in the ‘To’ email

address. If you automatically add a signature to the bottom of all your emails, you should highlight and delete it from this email.

If you are sending attachments with this standard message, such as a PDF brochure, attach them now.

Now, instead of pressing SEND, you should click on the Office icon and choose Save As

Now you should save it somewhere obvious (such as your desktop). You should change the ‘Save As Type’ to read Outlook Template.

Click Save. Then you can close the message. You will be asked if you wish to save it again – say No at this point.

You will now have an icon on the desktop. If you double click it, it will create a new message with the same text, subject and attachments in it. You can now fill in the recipient’s name and hit send.

If you want to change the message, simply double-click the icon to create a new message, make the changes you want and then do the ‘Save As’ procedure to overwrite the template.

This little routine can also be completed in Outlook 2003, but you need to turn off editing in Word. To do this, go to Tools > Options > Mail Format

And then untick ‘Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages’ .

With a bit of planning you can use template emails from all the machines in your office. The templates can be placed on a central machine and shortcuts to them put on each desktop.

Seeing Double

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 06:30:00 +0000

Productivity is a funny thing. Often it’s not until you’ve used the right tools that you wonder how on earth you managed before. How productive you can be at your PC has many deciding factors. If you’ve recently moved up to a larger screen, you might have noticed just how much more relaxing it is to use.

With the easy side-by-side function of Windows 7 it’s quite easy to take advantage of the latest widescreen technology to run two applications alongside each other. I’m doing this right now, with a full word document on the left and a web browser on the right.

You can do this on Windows XP and Vista too, though it takes a little more effort. But it only really works on a large widescreen format monitor. In our offices and increasingly in many of our customer’s offices, users are running two screens side by side.

The multi-screen approach was first seen in dealing rooms, where a screen was left constantly displaying changing prices. But even in everyday office use, having a second screen allows the user to work on a document or email whilst bringing in data from a second application. Preparing a quote becomes so much easier when you can have the page your typing on in front of you and still access (and copy and paste from) a web browser window.

So how do you do it? For a laptop, you already have all the hardware that you need. Just plug in the external monitor and use both the laptop display and the monitor.

For a desktop machine you either have to add a second graphics card (from £40) but you’ll have to open the case to fit it. Or you can buy a USB to VGA adapter (for about £50) and you just have to plug it in. Then all you need is a 2^nd screen and you’re away.

Does this seem extravagant? It would contend that it does right up until the point that you first use it. Put one of these units in your office and we know from experience that it soon becomes the machine that your staff will want to use.

Oh, and if you’re one of those rare people with two machines, screens, keyboards and mice on the same desk, then you might want to take a look at Synergy (synergy2.sourceforge.net) which allows you to use one keyboard and mouse to control two computers, which still seeing the output on both screens. It’s free and if you share a desk I urge you to try it – if only to see the look on your colleague’s face as you ‘possess’ their keyboard and mouse.

If you’d like to see dual screens in action then visit us in Wellington Street and we’d be happy to show you.

Introducing Picasa

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:35:00 +0000

We’ve talked before about Google Docs and the move we seem to be making towards online applications. Whilst some of these are a little basic, the photo storage and editing application Picasa is not.

To start with Picasa is downloaded to your PC, just like any other piece of software. It’s simple to use and allows you to perform the sorts of changes to photographs that we all want to make. These include resizing and cropping, red eye removal etc. You can

also apply a variety of effects – sharpening pictures, sepia tints, enhancing colours. Finally, you can also do a little more advanced tuning to modify contrast and colour.

There’s also an auto photo enhance feature that will try and choose the best settings for the photo displayed. You can then add text to your photos and even tag the location of the photo subject and incorporate this in to Google Earth.

But it’s the organisation features of Picasa that turn this from a small but useful editing app in to one of those core programs that you use all the time. When you start Picasa it scans your machine and locates all your picture folders

and then lists them in a rather nice library view. This allows you to scroll easily through the thumbnails of images. When you double click on an image it zooms in and you’re presented with the editing options.

Along the bottom of the screen you’ll find a variety of ways to share your photos with others. You can upload your photos to a Picasa web album (you’ll need a Google account) and from there you can share them with others online. You can attach them to email or print them. If you use Facebook then you can upload directly in to your profile and if you have a blog you can send pictures to that too.

Now if you’ve used a Mac then you’ll have come across face recognition in the iPhoto program. This struck me as quite remarkable when I first saw it and it’s now built in to the latest version of Picasa. When you open Picasa, you’ll see a new People section. Inside this are all the photos that contain faces (in Picasa’s opinion). If you tell Picasa who one picture is, it will then find and group all other pictures of that person. You’d think it would make lots of mistakes, and it does make a few which can be quite amusing, but generally it’s very accurate – and you’ll find that many errors are down to family likenesses. Spooky.

If you’d like to take a look at Picasa, then it’s a free download from Google – just go to http://picasa.google.com

How to make change to the registry settings for Terminal Server users

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:11:00 +0000

There are occasions when you wish to make registry changes for Terminal Server users. These are changes below the HKEY_LOCAL_USER level. When logged in as administrator on the server, you see your own settings under this level, not the user’s.

When the user is logged in to Terminal Services, the contents of their HKEY_LOCAL_USER is duplicated under HKEY_USERS and you can make changes there. But under HKEY_USERS, the user names are not listed as the SID’s are displayed instead.

So you need to discover the SID for a particular user. Fortunately there is a tool you can use for this. PSGETSID is part of the pstools download (just search for pstools on the net for the Microsoft download site).

Once installed on your machine, type PSGETSID and you’ll get a response something like this;

SID for \:

S-1-5-21-143462703-1574925730-1539857752-1071

You can now run regedit and navigate to

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-143462703-1574925730-1539857752-1071

And if the user is logged on you should see a full tree.

Before making any changes, just confirm that you have the correct user. Look under ‘Volatile Environment’ and check the username under the APPDATA key. It should have a value such as;

C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data where matches the user you’re hoping to edit.

You can now make changes to the registry for this user. When the user logs out of terminal services, the changes will be saved (locally) and also to their roaming profile if these are used.

Remember – always export a backup copy of any keys you are planning to change.

What is this browser choice thing ?

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:39:00 +0000

If you running Windows XP, Vista or 7 and you keep you install your Windows updates, then you may have been prompted to choose your browser recently.This is not a ghost in your PC, it’s all as a result of an EU settlement, in which Microsoft is required to inform customers who currently use Internet Explorer as their default browser, that there are other web browser choices available.

The browser choice screen (which can be displayed again from a new icon on your desktop) gives you the option of install one of 4 alternative browsers alongside Internet Explorer 8.

Now browser enthusiasts are a loyal bunch, so it’s difficult to make this choice without succumbing to someone’s pet preference, so trying to be as objective as possible, here’s my very brief run-down of the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Firefox (by Mozilla)

Firefox has a very loyal and vocal following, proud of the browsers open-source heritage. It’s easy to use, it’s safe and because of the way that it’s grown through years of open-source developments, it’s very configurable. If you want to customize your surfing experience then Firefox has a huge range of add-ons. It’s generally stable but can be a little heavy on memory if you have lots of things open.

Chrome (by Google)

This is the newest browser available in the list and is easily the most sparse, even minimalist. Chrome is arguably the fastest of the five and its cut down design makes it one of the most stable. There’s much less customisation, but if you just want to get on the web and surf then it’s hard to beat.

Internet Explorer 8 (by Microsoft)

If you moved away from Internet Explorer because of a previous version, then you should take a look at the new version 8. Yes, a lot of the features seem direct steals from the Firefox experience, but IE is now more secure, faster and more stable. There is still a feeling that this is the non-choice option though, as Chrome is faster and Firefox more functional.

Safari (by Apple)

Safari is typical Apple. On the plus side it’s lovely to look at and arguably faster than Chrome as long as your don’t push it too hard. There are some nice integration features for iPhone and IPod users too. But there a very few customisation options and Safari does render text and images in a slightly different way, which can make things look – well a bit odd. If Apple is your thing, then Safari is too – but then why aren’t you using a Mac ?

Opera (by Opera)

Opera has been around forever it seems and there’s a tendency to forget it in this list, even if most of the others have learnt a lot from ideas pioneered by Opera. It’s quick too and the new acceleration features pioneered in Opera Mini (for mobiles) could make it the fastest of all these 5. But it’s a quirky choice and it suffers with a lack of testing against some websites because of this. If you’re on dial-up still then it’s worth a look as it has features to improve download times on slow connections.

Look out this is a raid

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:31:00 +0000

I don’t plan to delve too often in to the esoteric configurations of ‘performance’ PCs – partly because we don’t get very involved in the gaming end of the PC market and often enthusiasts, as the name suggests, get enthusiastic about supporting their own kit.

But there is an area that does cause us some problems and that’s when some bright spark decides to incorporate a RAID disk setup in an otherwise unremarkable machine. This usually happens when a manufacturer either wants to increase the available disk space on a unit, but doesn’t want the parts cost of the latest capacity disks, or they simply want to suggest that the RAID configuration will enhance the speed of an ‘performance’ machine.

RAID, an acronym whose disassembly adds nothing to its meaning, is a way of configuring multiple hard drives to protect (through data redundancy) or extend (through striping) the capacity of the disks in the configuration, or both.

Before we get too bogged down in the technicalities, let’s assume that you have a machine with two 250GB hard disks in it and the unit has a RAID controller installed as part of the configuration. In this assumption, you have three choices.

Firstly, you could have a C: drive of 250GB with Windows on it (let’s ignore all the other OS’s for this experiment please) and the D: drive (another 250GB) you could use for anything else – such as files, pictures and music. If either of the drives failed, then you’d lose half of your system and have to rely on your backups for the other half.

Or, you could adopt RAID 0 – striping. Under this configuration, your machine (i.e. Windows) thinks it has one big 500GB disk (the C: drive) and all of your machine is on it. The RAID controller is actually writing data to both disks, sort of taking it in turns. You have more space, it’s slightly faster because there are two disks handling the writing load, but if either disk fails you lose the lot and have to go back to your backups.

Or finally, you could use RAID 1 – mirroring. This gives you a C: drive of just 250GB but your data is written to both drives simultaneously. If either of the drives fails, then your data is entirely safe and you don’t have to rely on your backup.

RAID 1 mirroring and its big brother RAID 5, is routinely used in servers – in fact we wouldn’t supply one without it and if you had to choose from the three scenarios above, then why wouldn’t you choose a RAID 1 mirror? If disk space is your reason, then I suggest you should buy bigger disks rather than adopt RAID 0.

But the problem that we face so frequently in the workshop is a machine with a failed hard drive and a RAID 0 stripe, where the owner has no idea that it had been configured this way. This is common in some of the higher spec Dell units and some Sony laptops, often sold as performance workstations.
Undoing these setups once the machine is in use is difficult (and therefore costly) but at least forewarned is forearmed.

The soul of the machine

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:14:00 +0000

Everything you know as the configuration of your PC, what it looks like when you use it, is all on the hard disk.

It’s not the motherboard or any other components. If I put your PC in a big box and just give you the screen display you’d still recognise it. From the desktop background, the icons, the programs installed and the data within them - all of that, every bit of it, is stored on the hard disk.

It’s easy to understand that the files within My Documents are stored on the disk and that the emails, somehow, are stored in the same way. But what about the picture you chose as the background or the sound the PC makes when an email arrives? The remembered wireless network settings and the printer drivers and way that the Tesco website recognises who you are without telling it. All of these things are stored on your hard drive, a delight of spinning fragility encased in milled aluminium.

At our workshop there is only one fault we are unable to fix. Any component can be replaced, any software reloaded, any virus detected and disinfected. But we cannot recover lost data – not once it is lost. We’ve invested thousands in data recovery equipment with just one aim, to reduce the number of times we have to face that situation.

A few weeks ago I met a couple of customers who’d had problems with their laptops. One had gone to see a local chain store and the other had sent his laptop back to the manufacturer for repair. Both machines came back working, but with the hard disks wiped and returned to their factory configurations. Both lost their data, emails, configuration and drivers. We helped them get working again, but the data had gone. Unfortunately this is common, almost guaranteed with some manufacturers, and it isn’t support as we would define the term.

It’s about now that you’d expect me to launch in to an exhortation for you to take backups. But you know that already. I’ve spoken before about how you should back up, but if you’re trying to use CDs or DVDs then I suggest you’re making life difficult for yourself and perhaps you’re not backing up everything you need to. Use a removable hard disk – it’ll cost £50-90 and it’ll come with software allowing you to back up everything. And that must include the System State (that’s Microsoft’s term but most backup software recognises it). If the backup software allows you to take an image of the disk, even better. The system state includes a backup of the Registry – there’s nothing special about the registry it’s just a database of the settings of the machine (broadly). With a registry backup and a backup of all the files on your disk it is possible (but a bit fiddly) to resurrect your PC as you recognise it. With a disk image, you can do the same, but it’s easier.

The hard drive is probably the most likely component to fail in your PC. It’s the second most common fault, after virus infections, that our Thame workshop deals with.

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:31:00 +0000

A quick word about processors

If you’re considering a new machine at the moment, there are a few new Intel processors to consider. For probably a couple of years we’ve been talking about dual cores and core2duo’s. So let’s take a look at what Intel are doing and perhaps help you make the correct choice.

There are still some Intel Celeron and Pentium processors around, but I suggest you ignore those. Low end machines are still being sold with Dual Core chips (sometimes described as core duo). These are two processor cores on one die – like having twin processors on a single chip. These have been around since 2004 ! Yes, I know.. 2004 ! I suggest that unless price is a huge consideration, you ignore these too.

Next up is the Core2Duo (you can almost hear the Intel music when you say that) – well this is also two core’s on one chip, but it’s the second generation of Dual Core and speeds are higher as a result. Then there’s Core2Quad – one processor and 4 cores. These are theoretically twice as quick as a Core2Duo but in practice the software doesn’t achieve this, but they are still noticeably faster.

But now Intel has tried to simplify this with the “i” ranges of processors. For desktops these start with i5s, which will end up as the starting level. They are quad core and actually came out after i7, but use the more familiar memory configuration of pairs of chips per processor.

i7 processors have 8 cores, or rather they pretend to, being actually quad core with HyperThreading to present as 8 processors. For the best performance you need 3 memory chips per cpu, so expect to see memory sizes in 3,6,12GB configurations rather than 2,4,8GB. With the proper memory configuration, these processors are about 30% faster than quad cores.

And if they’d just stopped there it would be easy. There are some i7 processors that use the i5 format and have a designation number starting with 8 (such as the 860) – normal i7s start with 9 (920, 950, 975).

There’s also a new starter designation for laptops, the i3, which are a direct replacement for Core2 and are similar, if a little lighter, than i5.

When you compare the new Intel i5 and i7 processors against the dual core processor, you can see that things have moved on considerably. But even against the popular Core2Duo processor, the i5 is around twice as fast. The closeness of the i5 and Core2Quad is probably why we’re not seeing a lot of the Core2Quad processors in the market.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that these units work best with the correct memory configuration, be it in pairs or triplets. There are still a large number machines being sold with 32bit versions of Windows. A 32bit machine has a memory limit of 4gb, so unless you know you’ll never need to upgrade, choose a 64bit machine.

Bring your PC up to speed

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:56:00 +0000

The speed of your PC is down to a handful of factors – some that are easy to improve. The speed of your machine is affected by bottlenecks and the trick is identifying them.

The processor inside your machine affects the speed, the same way the engine in your car would. Engine swaps are possible and so are processor upgrades. But how likely are you to do it? My advice is to look elsewhere for extra performance.

Memory or RAM is the temporary storage that your machine uses when running programs and reading and writing data. When you switch the machine off it’s emptied. When your machine runs low on available memory, it uses a bit of the hard disk instead. Since hard disks are much much slower than memory, if your PC doesn’t have enough memory it will be using the disk as well and will slow down as a result. Adding more memory (until the disk is not used) is the single most effective change you can make to the performance of your PC.

Assuming your hard disk has more than 10% of its space free, it will run as fast as the day it was made. But hard disks have increased in speed considerably over the last 3-5 years. If you have upgraded the other components in your PC but kept the old hard disk, then consider a change. When you do change, put in a 7200rpm unit with as much cache memory as you can afford.

Let’s assume that you are beyond Windows 98 or ME and have Windows XP, Vista or 7. Windows XP will be slower today than when you got your machine, as Windows updates have bloated it somewhat. Windows Vista was never a slim child and now looks positively chubby in comparison to the athletic Windows 7. If you have XP it’s probably best to stay there, just add some RAM. If you have Vista, especially on a new machine then save up for 7 – your machine will thank you.

Here’s a test. Time how long it takes your machine from the moment you press the power button, to being able to type the word TEST in to your favourite word processor (WordPad will do). This is the first test that we do in our £25 Check and Tune service. Under a minute? Under two? The worst I’ve seen is a little over nineteen, but it’s more common to see machines taking 3 to 5 minutes before they can be used. Most of this delay is caused by too many programs that load at startup. So look at the list of icons by the time in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. Do they need to be running? Remove what you can and time your machine again.

Few machines are just slow; with a bit of encouragement many can be made to run a whole lot better.

Put your head in the cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Gray) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:50:00 +0000

Where do you read your email, check your calendar and update your contacts? Is it on the PC in your study or a machine at work? Perhaps at lunch you write that letter to the bank and save it to.. well to a memory stick so that you can take it home – or do you email it to yourself. Or do you use a laptop, an electronic version of the bulging Filofax that you carried for years; until you finally conceded that no-one carries Filofaxes any more. Your laptop knows what you’re supposed to be doing, with whom and when and where in a digital web of emails, contacts, calendar and documents. It is a laptop that, if mislaid, mishandled or misappropriated will leave you just as bereft as that loss of the Filofax two decades earlier.

Cloud computing will be as familiar to many of you as the BBC website, but probably not by name. If you use Hotmail or Yahoo for your email, it’s likely that you access your messages through a browser (such as Internet Explorer). You don’t download your messages to a particular machine and so you immediately have the benefit of viewing your emails from any internet-connected PC. You probably access your contact list in the same way too. If you have a Google mail account, you have the option of running an online calendar too. It links in with reminders through your email and whilst it’s not as functional as the likes of Outlook 2007, it works quite well. You have the option of multiple calendars and you can share your calendar with others.

I suspect a lot of people stop there: mail, calendar and contacts - available, identical, from any internet enabled PC. But the cloud can go a big step further than that and it’s a step that Google wants you to take. Google docs is the key, the step that changes the way we use PCs and it’s what Cloud computing is about. With Google docs you can create word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. You do this through the web, which means that you don’t need to own the software on your PC. The documents are stored online, not on the PC, and can be shared amongst your contacts for editing or review. You can download and upload documents and open standard Microsoft Office attachments within your email.

There are problems, of course. For a start, you need to consider backups, and facilities for this appear to be far from developed. Microsoft Office is a mature and powerful product that makes the Google offering look singularly basic. But Microsoft Office can add several hundred pounds to the cost of a PC and that’s every PC, whilst Google’s offering is free – wherever and whenever you need it.

This change is coming. Your PC may remain on your desk, but your data could soon be in the clouds.