If you are still running these at your business or at home, an upgrade is called for as soon as possible.

I applaud this move toward security and productivity. I don’t think it will be a easy task for Google, but I believe it will be worth the effort in the long run.

Does your company need to consider switching away from Windows?

First off, what if I had a very simple security fix, requiring no new software to be purchased or installed, and with minimal configuration changes, that could block 64% of all Microsoft vulnerabilities reported in 2009? Would you be interested? What if I told you we had a fix that could also prevent 94% of Internet Explorer and 100% of Internet Explorer 8 vulnerabilities reported in 2009? How about blocking 100% of Microsoft Office vulnerabilities reported in 2009? Still not enough? How about blocking 90% of critical Windows 7 vulnerabilities reported to date?

As you should have guessed by now, the fix for all of these is the same: removing administrative rights from end users over their PCs.

While there are still some (poorly written) desktop applications which require administrative rights to run, I have found these to be relatively few in number these days, and once the initial configuration has been done, most programs run just fine as an ordinary user. Despite the additional configuration required by some programs, including hardware drivers, that needs to be done by an admin, the cost of setting these up the right way is generally far less than recovering from the damage caused by a serious malware outbreak.

The press release and the complete report are available from BeyondTrust’s website.

If you have not yet looked at one of these other browsers, I strongly recommend you do. If you are wedded to Internet Explorer, then you should at least be on version 7, if not 8. Also, several of our clients have been told that they must use Internet Explorer for an application that they use which requires it. What’s shocking is that several of my clients have vendors who insist that they continue to use IE 6! This, despite the fact that it’s easily the least secure mainstream browser still available today. If you are unlucky enough to be in this group, I strongly recommend you put pressure on your vendors who are requiring IE 6, and tell them to support current versions, or better yet, make their application less browser-specific so that it works with other platforms like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

All of your email in one inbox

As for new features, the first thing I noticed was the option to display all of your accounts’ inboxes in one location, just as recent versions of Apple’s Mail have. For instance, if you have a work email address and a home email address, and you check them both with the same email client, you can now view all new messages in a single inbox. I’m sure that fans of GTD will applaud this move. As for me, I wasn’t totally sold on this feature, but after experimenting with it for a day or so, I started to like it. If the goal is to be notified of new email from various sources, this definitely meets it. However, if you like keeping things separated (for example, not getting distracted with personal emails while at work, or bothered with work while at home), this isn’t necessarily for you.

Tabbed emails

While setting up Thunderbird, you are presented with the option to synchronize IMAP accounts onto your local hard drive. This is a great feature if you travel and don’t have an Internet connection, but still want to be able to read your email while offline. I did note that it took a very long time to synchronize my Gmail account, which has gigabytes of saved email on it, but that’s to be expected. I was able to use Thunderbird while the sync was going on, so it did not bother me.

The first thing I noticed was that the user interface has been simplified, with some of the button clutter removed. Also, by default messages open in new tabs, as opposed to new windows. While I am very used to this method of presenting information in web browsers (as Firefox has had this feature for years), I haven’t quite gotten used to it in email. However, I’m starting to like it more as I use it.

Thunderbird 3's new search

Thunderbird’s new search engine is immediately noticeable the first time you search your inbox for something. The results are presented in a new fashion, but more importantly, Thunderbird indexes all of your messages for faster search results, and you don’t have to search folder by folder for messages, as it will go through all of them for you. While I use Gmail for most of my email, I still like using Thunderbird as the client. However I frequently have found myself going back to the Gmail web interface when I need to search for a lost message. Hopefully this will no longer be necessary with Thunderbird’s new search capabilities.

Also, taking another page from the Gmail book, Thunderbird now lets you archive your email by pressing ‘A’ while reading any message. While I generally file all of my emails away (in folders in Thunderbird or with a label, then archiving in Gmail) sometimes I don’t have a particular folder or label to apply to an email. I know I don’t want to delete it, but I also don’t want to stick it in a file. I just want it gone… until I want it back again. That’s what archiving is for. This is another feature I’ve found myself logging in to the Gmail interface for. Unfortunately, Thunderbird’s archive feature is different from Gmail’s, so when I archive an email in Thunderbird, I still need to sign in to Gmail’s web interface to archive it there. However, if I never used the Gmail interface, this would not be an issue.

It is worth noting that I did have some stability problems with the beta and release candidates in late November, however they all seem to have been sorted out and the release version is rock-solid on Mac OS X and Linux. I have not yet tested the Windows versions, but I have high hopes. This is a noteworthy improvement to Thunderbird which I am grateful to have. In short, if you do not require connectivity to a Microsoft Exchange server (for calendar, contacts, and other non-email data) I recommend you try Thunderbird 3.

Oh, did I mention that it’s free?

Nearly every one of our clients has a place for Linux within their organization. Traditionally, this has been as some form of server (web, file, database, network monitoring, firewall, DNS, etc.). However, with Likewise, the hassle of making a Linux box talk to Windows has been greatly simplified.

While I will not engage in the debate of whether OpenOffice.org is a good replacement for Microsoft Office in a corporate setting, or whether you are better off with or without Microsoft Outlook as your primary email client in this blog post, I will say that just about every organization we work with has staff who only do a couple of very simple tasks with their computer, such as surf the web, send and receive email, occasionally make a word processed document or spreadsheet, and view PDF files. All of these features work perfectly well under Linux, so why not deploy it in your organization?

For one thing, there hasn’t always been an easy way to manage a Linux server’s user accounts from Windows. What this means is if you have a username and a password that you use for Windows, you’d need a separate one for Linux. Multiple usernames and passwords frequently confuse novice users, so this has been a potential hurdle.

Likewise clears this hurdle with ease. Now, you can sit down at a Linux computer, and your Windows username and password, and log in. With a little scripting magic from a Linux expert, it is possible to have your Desktop and Documents folders automatically available to you as well.

The best part is that most Linux distributions still run perfectly well on older hardware. While newer systems struggle to meet the requirements to run Vista or Windows 7, most older systems still in production will run Ubuntu just fine.

Linux has many other benefits. It is virtually immune to the bulk of spyware and viruses currently circulating the Internet today. Is it completely safe? No. However, since 99% of all malware is targeted at Windows, Linux is simply a much smaller target.

Finally, Linux is free. That’s right. Most Linux distributions (Ubuntu included) offer a completely free of charge, fully functional version.You can download a copy and try it, with no changes to your system, in under an hour on a high-speed Internet connection.

There’s no reason not to try Linux in your small business. Give it a shot! It may save you money and time.

I don’t know about the current Quicken for Macintosh, but last I checked, it did not use the same file format as the Windows version. This means if I create a file in Quicken, and want to use it on a Mac, I need to manually export every account (checkbook, investment, savings, loan, etc.) one at a time, and import it into the Mac version. Then, if I decide to go back to Windows, I need to do the same thing in the other direction. This is obviously not a fun or quick and easy process, so moving back and forth is not an option. If, for instance, you have a Mac and a Windows machine at home, and want to share the finances, you can’t easily do this with Quicken.

Another consistent annoyance is Quicken is bloated and slow. It frequently will hang and the window will strobe constantly, as if the focus is changing back and forth between two panels in the program. During this time, it is completely useless, and will often hang for several minutes, forcing me to terminate the program and restart it.

Intuit updates the software every year, and takes steps to make you have to upgrade, like disabling support for their older file format downloads from online banking institutions. However, they rarely add any new features that make it worth upgrading.

Finally, Quicken’s data file is prone to corruption. In the last year, mine got corrupted twice, forcing me to revert to a prior backup, losing a week or so worth of data on one occasion. That was the last straw.

Enter Moneydance. I first heard about Moneydance from Chess Griffin‘s Linux Reality podcast. Moneydance immediately appealed to me because it is available for Mac, PC, and Linux. Furthermore, all three editions share the same file format, so I could use Moneydance on my Mac, my Linux workstation, or my Windows desktop to do my finances, and not be tied to any one.

I was able to download a trial version from the Moneydance website, and install it in a few minutes. Immediately, I noticed that Moneydance loads more quickly than Quicken. Its interface is less flashy, and different from the one I’m used to with Quicken, but I was able to quickly learn my way around so that I could transfer my finances to it.

Moneydance supports the current QFX (Quicken 2005 or newer) file download type, as well as the older QIF import, which Quicken no longer supports. I exported all of my accounts from my credit union as of July 1, and reconciled them in Moneydance. A (very minor) glitch I saw here was that there was no way to “accept all” transactions – I had to click “accept” to each and every transaction as I imported them. Given that I was importing a month’s worth of transactions from three accounts, this took a while.

Another small quirk is that Moneydance assigns a default category to every transaction. For some reason, it chose “ATM Withdrawl” as mine (probably because it was alphabetically first in line), so everything I imported was an “ATM Withdrawl.” I had to go through and change categories on them to things like healthcare, groceries, aikido, etc.

Moneydance, with several accounts’ information loaded, uses around 10MB of memory. Quicken, on the other hand, took up nearly 80MB of memory just to load.

Moneydance also allows me to sort my registers by date ascending or descending – something Quicken never let me do. Amazing. Now I can look at my register side-by-side with my online banking statement in the same order!

One useful feature which Moneydance appears to lack is integration with larger financial institutions for automated downloads. Ameritrade, Bank of America, American Express, etc., all offer services to integrate Quicken with these and other institutions, making updating your accounts online very simple. Unfortunately, with Moneydance, this requires visiting the financial institution’s website and downloading files, or manually updating investment account balances. Given that I have to visit my local credit union’s site to download my statements anyway, this is not a huge inconvenience. However, updating my stock portfolios is proving to be a little more work than I had hoped.

In short, Moneydance is well worth the $39.99. It costs about the same as Quicken, runs on multiple platforms, chews up fewer resources, and lacks all of the bloat.

Enter Rubber Ducky. This utility presents your system’s performance as an aquarium with five components: water (physical and virtual memory), fish (network traffic), plants (hard drive activity), bubbles (CPU activity), and, of course, the Rubber Ducky.

Each of these components tells you something about your system. If the water level is too high, it means your computer is using up all of its memory, and the poor little ducky will drown. If the water is muddy, it similarly means that your machine is using too much virtual memory. Both of these are symptoms of not enough memory in your computer and are usually easily addressed by purchasing and installing more. After all, you can never have too much memory.

The fish represent network traffic. If you are downloading large files, streaming music, etc., you will see more fish than normal. If your computer is not doing anything, and you see a lot of fish, then something else is probably going on the background (possibly some sort of malware, doing things like using your machine to send spam and viruses), and it may be worth investigating.

The plants indicate hard drive activity. Lots of plants? Your drive may be overused or again, something you don’t know about could be using the drive. Perhaps an automated backup is running, or maybe something has gone wrong.

Finally, the bubbles indicate the CPU usage. Lots of bubbles? Your system is either underpowered or there may be a runaway program that is monopolizing the processor.

While Rubber Ducky System Monitor is not an in-depth diagnostic tool, it does provide a friendly, easy to read display that anyone can easily understand. I recommend this for users who want to understand their system’s performance without having to dive deep into the guts of Windows to do so. Plus, it makes a squeaky sound like a real rubber ducky when you click on it. How cute is that?

Recently one of our client’s Ghost subscriptions came up for renewal. While Ghost does what it’s designed to do well enough, we were wondering what other options there were out there in the world. Enter FOG.

My boss approached me a few weeks ago and asked me to evaluate this project for use at a client location. I had some experience using Ghost and other imaging solutions, so I knew what he wanted.

The biggest change going from Ghost to FOG is that FOG uses a Linux server and Ghost requires Windows. Right away, this can save money on licensing fees, as you don’t need to dedicate a Windows server license (usually around $700 or more) to the task. All of the other tools are roughly the same.

Using FOG definitely shows Ghost’s age. You can only manage a Ghost session through the GhostCast interface which is an application that runs on the Ghost server. By contrast, the main FOG interface is a very slick web page. From here you can manage computers that have been registered with the FOG server, groups of computers, images and tasks that have been started.

I already mentioned that FOG has more features than Ghost. From the FOG boot menu (which is handled completely over the network) you’re given options to register a system with the FOG database or run a memory test (useful to diagnose certain hardware problems). From the FOG management interface you can also set other “tasks” to go when you connect a machine to the FOG server like, “deploying” an image, creating an image, Virus Scan (Using Clam AV), drive wipes, disk test (for errors), file recovery and more. FOG even has a mobile version for handheld devices with a modern web browser (smartphones, iPhones, and other PDAs).

If you need any more reason to switch form Ghost to FOG , how about the fact that FOG operated faster than Ghost? In our tests, I was able to image multiple machines in the time it took me to image one with Ghost. Bear in mind these aren’t “official” benchmarks, but 6 clients in around 10 minutes is great when compared to Ghost, which took 7 minutes a single machine.

If that doesn’t interest you, how about a cost comparison? FOG is Free, Open Source Software (FOSS). There are no license fees, and no cost for obtaining the software (although we do suggest donations to open source projects that you find useful). With Ghost you have to purchase the software, purchase licenses, purchase annual support contracts, and Ghost is also slower than FOG so you end up paying for more in labor costs.

In summary, FOG is free (both gratis and libre), open source, fast and has more features than Ghost. If you use computer imaging, we highly recommend looking at FOG for your company’s use.