Reviews

One of the hardest things to know about technology is how it will hold up and be supported over the years. I’d like to share two of my favorite resources - PC Magazine’s Reader Survey and Epinions. PC Magazine each year compiles information about brand satisfaction by product type (printers, desktops, cameras, etc), support quality, repair rates, etc. Some of the results will surprise you - for example Brother’s black and white lasers repair rate is 1/4 of HPs! http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,1874,1626131,00.asp

Epinions is a user driven review site, reviews are overwhelmingly useful and the review quality is well controlled. Epinions has reviews of almost anything - computers, electronics, household items, books, and more.

http://www.epinions.com/

Vista No More Secure

CRN’s recent testing found that Windows Vista and Windows XP are equally at risk of viruses and exploits - even though Vista was supposed to be more secure. We’re still trying to find what Vista is actually better at - in the meantime I can’t keep reminding people enough that Vista isn’t ready for business use and has seemingly no advantages over Windows XP.

http://crn.com/software/199701019

Mozy for Mac!

One of my favorite online backup services is now Mac compatible! This is great news as the Mac has been short on online backup options. Mozy for personal use is free for 2GB of storage and $5/month for unlimited storage (Mozy Pro, the business version, isn’t out on Mac yet) - so there is no excuse for not backing up! Don’t forget though unlimited storage is limited by your internet connection’s upload speed - backing up tens of gigabytes will take days if not longer.

https://mozy.com/mozy/macmozy

Free Voicemail Special

I’m sure everyone who’s called in lately has heard our new phone system, Talkswitch. This month we have a great special on the 240vs Talkswitch system - a free one hour voicemail upgrade ($100 value)! The 240vs handles two inbound lines, four local extensions, ten remote extensions (cell phones), and with the upgrade has 1.5 hours of voicemail all for just $695!

Tech Word of the Month - Whitelisting

With SPAM continuing to come in at high levels, most companies have tightened junk email filters to keep inboxes clean. Inevitably some “false positives” will occur where legit email gets filtered out. Any filter should give you a regular digest of filtered email or show you a separate spam box, however to prevent recurring false positives whitelisting can help. Whitelisting is a feature every spam filter I’ve seen has, simply saying to always allow specific emails/domains through (the opposite of a blacklist).

A few tips to prevent your email from being filtered out:

1) Don’t use free email sites or ISP emails (aol, hotmail, etc)

2) Don’t use excessive capitalization, punctuation, etc

3) Put in a subject line and message body in every email

Green Tech
With earth day just having passed its worth mentioning the green PC movement. You’ll now regularly see the term ROHS, its the European Union’s new rules restricting the quantity of lead, cadmium, mercury and a bunch of impossible to pronounce flame retardants in electronics. So far there’s no green standard for the US, but many manufacturers like Dell, Apple, Intel, AMD, HP and others are introducing initiatives to further reduce energy use, reduce toxics, and improve their recycling programs.

Even with greener PC recycling isn’t just important - its the law! In King County as of 2005 computers, monitors, TVs and cell phones are not accepted in the garbage. To recycle these items King County keeps a list of recycling locations online.

http://www.metrokc.gov/dnrp/swd/takeitback/electronics/index.asp

Before recycling a PC, its important to securely wipe it out. Darik’s Boot and Nuke is an easy CD which will wipe out your PC so the data is unrecoverable.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Security Lemons
Its not often I talk about security as its so multi-faceted and changing so often. But one recent article “How Security Companies Sucker Us With Lemons” was a fantastic statement on the issue of not just buying security but technology in general.

Security is a lot like the used car market - a used car market includes both good cars and lousy ones (lemons). The seller knows which is which, but the buyer can’t tell the difference — at least until he’s made his purchase. I’ll spare you the math, but what ends up happening is that the buyer bases his purchase price on the value of a used car of average quality.

This means that the best cars don’t get sold; their prices are too high. Which means that the owners of these best cars don’t put their cars on the market. And then this starts spiraling. The removal of the good cars from the market reduces the average price buyers are willing to pay, and then the very good cars no longer sell, and disappear from the market. And then the good cars, and so on until only the lemons are left.

In a market where the seller has more information about the product than the buyer, bad products can drive the good ones out of the market. Back to technology - good technology is often at purchase indistinguishable from bad technology and in short the market doesn’t always reward the best technology.

Purchase cost is the easy way to compare - but is often the wrong metric to find a good product, a low total cost of ownership, or best return on investment.

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/04/securitymatters_0419?currentPage=all

Sunrise Solutions Breakfast
This month’s Sunrise Solutions features Dan Weedin - a reformed (former) insurance salesguy. Dan knows the industry cold and is not affiliated with any insurance company- his advice and recommendations are for your benefit. He’s speaking on 8 Simple Rules to Better Insurance buying, I’ll be there and afterwards I’m told I’ll even understand my insurance (a bit).

http://www.winfreeseattle.com/index.php?pr=Events

Tip of the Month
Google has a great new service - Google 411 beta is a voice activated 411 service which is completely free and so far I’ve found it easy and effective. Just call 1800-466-4411 to give it a try.

- Kevin Selkowitz

Talkswitch was the answer - feature rich, simple, and reliable. It does everything I could dream of - POTS and VoiP lines, a variety of analog and VoiP handsets, call forwarding to cell phones, voicemail to email, and the usual features (paging, parking, transfers, autoattendants, etc).

I’ve been running Talkswitch for a few months and keep finding new reasons to be excited - its adapted to every new need I’ve had, the free software upgrades keep improving the system, and the add-ons are amazing.

If your small business is looking for a phone system you don’t just owe it to yourself to look at Talkswitch - look first at the Talkswitch.

We’ve been eating our dog food with the Talkswitch, Soholaunch on Seattle Trikke (my side project) and soon our whole company infrastructure. Like many of your companies, our data is spread out in calendars, address books, notebooks, config files, and stuck in my pretty little head. That “system” doesn’t scale well and the software tools were either too expensive or didn’t work right - fortunately a new option appeared.

In the coming weeks we’ll be rolling out a new Relavis Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and eSupport package to put all this knowledge in one place my staff can access.  In the coming months we’ll be offering CRM, ERP, and Document Management to our customers to help your small business with these hard problems.

More Kevins
Also related to the previous topic, Kevin Shepherd came on board a couple months ago to help add expertise with this new market. Kevin’s background is highly diverse but is highly experienced in the technology underlying our coming line of products (Domino). With Kevin’s help and these new tools, we’ll be able to offer small businesses really critical and valuable tools. Plus I get a chuckle out of the many confusing situations caused by having two guys with the same first name and initials.

Download of the Month
Photoshop is the king of graphics software, but for those of us who want almost the same power without the huge cost, there’s other options. Paint.net is a great Photoshop clone and completely free. Gimp for Windows and Mac are open source (free) and also very powerful. GraphicConverter is my favorite for Mac and just $30.

Even more interesting were about half of failures came without any sign or diagnosable warning. Don’t assume your data is safe because of drive age, brand, utilization, current operation, etc - backups are less expensive and easier than data recovery!
Microsoft Taking a Beating
A few highlights in the recent Microsoft related news:

The US Department of Transportation has placed an indefinite moratorium on using Windows Vista due to “no compelling technical or business case for upgrading”
full article…

Microsoft’s OneCare Antivirus recently was rated dead last in a test of effectiveness against 17 other antivirus products, catching just 82.4% of malicious software.
full article…

One of the promises of Windows Vista is tighter security, a major component of Vista security is “User Account Control” (a.k.a. UAC). Turns out Microsoft now admits UAC doesn’t actually make systems more secure! (obviously only the technical department admits this, not marketing)
full article…

I know I’ve said it already, but keep holding off on Vista and don’t depend on Microsoft products when it comes to security!
Top Ten Ways to @#$% Up Your Network
I’ll be speaking at the upcoming Sunrise Solutions breakfast in Seattle on the topic of “Top Ten Ways to @#$% Up Your Network.” This is a great event for anyone who wants to better understand the technology issues you need to protect yourself from! Its March 20th, 7:30am at the Swedish Cultural Center in Seattle. Info and RSVP at winfreeseattle.com
New Phone System
In case you haven’t called us since Friday, next time you call you’ll notice we just put in a new phone system. Figuring out how to solve our phone issues lead me to a product called the TalkSwitch - an insanely powerful and affordable phone system for small businesses. Give us a call sometime to try it out - we liked it so much we’re now Authorized Talkswitch Partners!

First, let me review the pros and cons:

Mac pros:

• Exceptionally easy to use
• Highly reliable
• No viruses or spyware
• Support from the Mac Geniuses and AppleCare are unparalleled
• The hardware is just cool and among the most reliable
• Geek friendly - UNIX core and optional virtualization to run Windows
• Really cool Mac-only software like Delicious Library, iWork, iLife, Comic Life and others.
• Macs are affordable and comparable in price to a good quality PC

Mac cons:

• Compatibility - not all software you want to run works on the Mac. Though there usually is a comparable product or you can run Parallels or Crossover to make the Windows app work on the Mac.
• No cheap hardware - though that could be a pro as well as cheap hardware is…cheap.

Windows pros:

• Its bound to work with everything
• Nearly everyone knows it

Windows cons:

• Security - Microsoft does a miserable job keeping Windows secure, there are hundreds of thousands of viruses, malware, rootkits, etc
• Reliability - Windows still gets less reliable and slower with age
• Everything is harder - Windows is just less refined and it shows on anything from installing a network printer to uninstalling a program.

If you are a residential computer user or a student, you probably should have a Mac. Chances are you don’t have anything necessitating a Windows PC and the Mac is easier, safer, and more fun.

If you’re a small business, it just depends. Some small businesses run really well on Macs - and I can tell you from experience they have need of computer consultants less often. But ultimately its a question of which platform delivers the functionality and application support your business needs.

Is It Hard To Switch?
I’ve seen many people switch both directions. The Mac to PC switch is very hard, but I’ve seen it done. The PC to Mac switch is easier, but still it helps to have a Mac person around to orient you to the basics. Everyone expects to need us for lots of Mac training, but what’s happened overwhelmingly is people figure it out on their own.

All the stories did however have a happy ending as Ontrack was able to recover the data from these systems! As Ontrack partners we can help you recover from nearly any disk failure, but prevention is the best (and least expensive) cure.

Read the entire top 10 at Ontrack.com.

Out of the box the system helps move everything over from your old Mac (OS X only) which works very well. Surprisingly it didn’t bring over my VPN connections though. Aside from that, quite flawless. Performance right off the bat was poor though - it had migrated a bunch of autoloading PowerPC applications which run slower since this is an Intel Mac. Once those were removed/updated the system was significantly faster.

For the first day I ran on the stock 512MB RAM, which is less than fun for someone who runs a dock full of apps all the time. I dared not even try Parallels. The machine was however snappy with a few Universal apps open.

One thing I noticed off the bat was amazing WiFi range. I’m seeing more networks and far better strength than with my older 12″ Powerbook.

Once I got my 2GB Edge RAM upgrade installed (easy as pie) I was VERY happy with performance. This thing is fast. Damn fast. Even fast when running Windows XP in Parallels.

The screen is great, I was a bit concerned about the glossiness, but its just perfect. Not so glossy that it always has glare (Sony) but easier to read and more vibrant than my Samsung desktop LCD.

All in all I definitely love the machine and think its the best laptop for most people under $1500. Though I always recommend AppleCare which adds $249 but extends warranty and support to 3 years.

If you’re looking to buy a new Mac, I highly recommend them over PCs. Email me to get 5% off your new Mac.