Electronic greetings cards are a fad that, sadly, has not yet passed and is still quite popular. These things are bad for several reasons, which I’ll outline in today’s post. (more…)
Archive for June, 2009
Why Electronic Greeting Cards Are Bad
Friday, June 26th, 2009Microsoft Office 2007 Document Compatibility
Friday, June 19th, 2009If you’ve purchased Microsoft Office recently, you got version 2007 (unless you’re on a Macintosh). Office 2007 represents a “great leap forward” according to some (in Microsoft marketing), but from my perspective, it’s a lot of change, and a lot higher system requirements for not a lot of new, useful features.
One of the “feature” of Office 2007 is the new document format. Like previous versions of office, this latest version uses a format that older versions cannot read. This makes perfect sense on two levels. The file format was made after the older versions were released, so they didn’t know about it, so they can’t read it. Also, from a sales perspective, it makes sense because if Alice runs Office 2007 and Bob runs Office 2003, Bob must then upgrade to Office 2007 to read Alice’s documents.
Or must Bob? (more…)
You Can Never Have Too Much Memory
Friday, June 12th, 2009This will be a short post on the virtues of keeping your computer hardware current. Even today, I still see older computers which would be perfectly capable of doing their job, but because of a lack of enough memory, they grind along at a glacial pace, causing significant employee productivity loss.
How can you tell if your machine could benefit from a memory upgrade? First off, if you hear your computer’s hard drive running hard, or see the hard drive indicator light on a lot, particularly if you have multiple applications running, that’s a good sign. Another is to use the Task Manager, a utility included with all versions of Windows, to see how much memory your computer is using. The best time to do this is to during the middle of your work day, when you have the most applications running. In Windows, simply press Ctrl-Shift-Esc and you should see something like the image to the right. Pay attention to the “Available” number under “Physical Memory.” If this number is lower than, say, 256,000, your machine could probably benefit from a memory upgrade.
Techspeak alert! Note that if you have a standard, 32-bit version of Windows (2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, or 7), the maximum memory that your system can use is 4GB, minus the amount of memory used by your video card. So if you have a fancy video card for gaming or CAD or some other applicaiton which requires a high-end card, however much memory is on that card counts against the total amount in your system. If you find that you need more than 4GB of memory in your system, then you need to run a 64-bit version of Windows to use it, otherwise your computer will simply see 4GB as the maximum available, unless your computer supports Address Window Extensions to do some backflips to allow it to see more than 4GB of memory.
Using Microsoft Outlook to Access Other Users’ Mailboxes
Friday, June 12th, 2009If you have a Microsoft Exchange server at your business, Microsoft Outlook has the ability to access more than one mailbox at a time. This is a useful feature if multiple users need to share access to the same email address, or if someone needs to cover another person’s email (when an auto-responder won’t suffice) while on vacation. (more…)
What is “Unified Threat Management?”
Friday, June 5th, 2009“Unified Threat Management” is a buzzphrase (that is, a few buzzwords strung together) heard a lot in networking and network security. Essentially, this is something (usually a device) which combines several network security services, including email filtering, web content filtering, firewalling, intrusion detection/prevention, and others. A UTM device can provide other services as well, such as VPN (Virtual Private Networking) support, to allow your remote workers to securely connect to your office. UTMs frequently seen in small businesses because they (usually) carry a lower cost than purchasing and managing several separate devices or software packages to perform the same functions. (more…)