Talk

In general, it has been my experience that locking things down for the home user can be a lot more challenging that it is for the enterprise user. Unfortunately, it is often times the home based PC user that needs the iron fist of common sense.

One of my business clients called me in dire straits - his two-year-old 12″ PowerBook G4 wouldn’t boot up. Turns out if you let it sit for a while and cool completely down, you could boot it up, but it would run only for about 10-15 minutes before just freezing up. It sounded like it [...]

This past Wednesday was a big day for me. I’ve been building up to a big network migration for a business client for several weeks, and Wednesday was the day I pulled it off. OK, not really that big, it’s only a four-person office. But heck, it’s big to me. Let me ’splain.
I’ve already written [...]

I recently visited China for an eye-opening whirlwind tour and adventure. You can read some of my comments in the IS China 2006 report. It has been a wake-up call for me to the realization that indeed we are on the verge of a new era of globalization. Unfortunately for us in the west the [...]

One of the companies I provide IT support for has a small number of HP business notebooks. The oldest one of the notebooks is just now turning one year old, which means its manufacturer’s warranty period is almost over. But we’ve really made use of the warranty because this laptop has been a serious problem [...]

If you read my previous article, you might remember me making an inquiry as to which application would be the best for helping to make my move to a new hard drive as smooth as possible. And here are the responses:

In my last posting, Stuck in the Middle Again, I detailed problems I was having getting some new BlackBerries set up with Enterprise Activation. I’m proud to report that nagging the reseller and wireless provider did pay off. All three of my client’s T-Mobile BlackBerry 8700gs are now set up to synch with their hosted [...]

Lately I have noticed two things that I have completely out grown. The first is my pants. Yeah, I seriously need to start biking again. But the other happens to be main hard drive on one of my PCs.

I’m continuing to work on various projects for my new small business clients. Things are, by and large, going well. The Hosted Exchange system is working wonderfully, the new laptops are set up, as are the new printers and Chilibox network appliance. But I’ve hit a snag. And it’s the type of snag that really [...]

For the most part, I believe it is just a good idea not to store anything locally on your notebook that could be used to ruin your day. This means that those of you that store your passwords in text file along with you bank information need to stop that foolishness right off! Sorry, just [...]

Sorry if you clicked on this thinking this was about chili in the edible sense. Instead, I’m going to talk about the Chilibox from Chilisystems. I had my first, ahem, taste of the Chilibox this past Monday, and I’m pretty impressed by what I see so far.
One of my residential customers recently called upon [...]

Earlier this month, we had a reader that had a few questions. While I don’t have time to address them both today, I will get to the one that I do have time for…

I located this recently and to the best of my knowledge completely forgot to share it until today! Yes, that sort of thing happens from time to time I suppose.

Anymore I’m not even sure what city I’m in on any given day. It’s been a bit hectic in the travel department lately. I shifted jobs at work a few months ago, and as a result of that change and various circumstances I have been flying all over the place. It’s tiring, and I have [...]

Recently, I had one of my clients call me to express some frustrations she had over dealing with the image files she had downloaded from her digital camera. She had no problems getting the images transferred from the camera to the PC, but she was having issues simply handling the files after they had been [...]

This past weekend was a real unusual one for me - a gig-free weekend! I have become so accustomed to having gigs or, at the very least, people dropping off sick PCs, that I was almost at a loss for what to do with myself. Almost. What was even better was that my wife, with [...]

Maybe it should be three, but the first one was a brand spanking new Lenovo ThinkPad T60 my brother just purchased. I helped him get some software set up on it and transfer files from his old laptop. The T60 was a core-duo sweetie with the trick little fingerprint reader. I still think those things [...]

Not too long back I received this from Jorge:

When thinking about upcoming gigs, I try very hard not to picture how long I think it will take to complete them. I’ve had gigs that I think will take four hours take less than two; then I’ve had gigs that I’m confident will be done in a couple hours take over four. So I [...]

It’s Friday as I write this. Although I’m still waiting to receive my latest “patients,” this week has been funny in the sense that three different people have called with non-bootable, or highly unstable, laptops. From preliminary conversations, I’ve found out that the laptops are not even that old, so I’m thinking we have either [...]