Home & Small Office Computer Guide

There is a growing move afoot in the computer world to use thin clients. Now don’t think that, if you’re like me and have a little bit more to cuddle, other businesses are going to start refusing to work with you. Remember, we’re talking computer talk now and thin client has nothing to do with your belt size and probably even less to do with your hat size.

No, a thin client refers to the file size of the programme that resides on your computer. If you like to use Microsoft products like Word and Excel you may have seen them described as ‘bloated’ and that’s an indication of what someone else thinks about the file size of the programme.

Well, bloated is in the eye of the beholder because if the tool works and works the way you want it to work who cares how much space it may or may not take up on your hard drive. These days the size of hard drives is increasing and their cost is coming down so bloat or not doesn’t really matter in my humble opinion.

However, if you are worried about bloat then you might be tempted to try some of those thin clients that are out there. That software is thin because most of it resides on the Internet rather than on your computer.

Now that may suit your business in some circumstances. Perhaps you or your staff travel a lot and you want to cut down on the software that has to be installed on the hard drives of the laptops that go on the road.

And then there’s the cost of licensing all that software. If you want to install Microsoft Office on several machines the price of those licenses can take your breath away and make some of the thin online clients look rather attractive. That attraction can become almost irresistible when you realize that some of those online clients are free.

However, don’t let the hype about thin versus bloat and the price tag blind you to reality.

The reality is that Internet connections can still fail, there are plenty of motels out there that still don’t give you access to a phone line for your modem and sometimes the servers where these thin clients reside are going to fail.

What do you do at times like that? Sit back and twiddle your thumbs?

Thin might be good but chubby can be better especially if productivity is an issue.

Banner ads are everywhere on the Net. They flash at you, they blink, they annoy, they encourage you to click and they also tend to make money for the site that is displaying them.

They seem to have been around forever … and they have.

It’s claimed that the very first banner ad appeared on the Net on October 25 1994 and was used to advertise AT&T.

If you want to see the worlds first banner ad just follow the link.

If you look back in the archived posts here for USB products you will soon see that there are some very strange little USB devices out there in the world but those are only the strange tip of a very big iceberg.

In-Stat, a marekt research firm suggests that there are more than 700 million USB devices in the market today and that number could increase to more than 2.1 billion in 2009.

Thank goodness that most of those have a more serious application than just sharpening your pencil.

Belkin has announced the release of its new cable free hub. This is said to be the industry’s first USB hub that does not require a cable to be connected to the computer.

The four port hub will not require any additional software but will need a dongle plugged into the user’s laptop. This new devide will allo lap top users to move around their environment and still remain connected to printers, scanners, hard drives etc. while they remain within wireless range.

This handy device should be released during the northern hemisphere spring.

There have been some interesting computer myths spring up over the years and some of them sound so plausible that it’s hard to know whether they are fact or fiction.

So if you would like to know just how mythical some of those myths are have a look at Busting the Biggest PC Myths

These days laptops come equipped with internal wi-fi cards but as recently as a couple of years ago, when we bought our latest laptop, wi-fi was new technology and internal cards were yet to be thought of.

When we moved to wi-fi for our home based business we bought a wi-fi network card for this laptop that plugs into a port on the side of the machine and over the last 12 months it has worked very well.

At the same time we have had all our equipment included in our household insurance. Our insurance company was quite happy to include our computers because we could legitimately say that every one of them was used, in very small part, for private use.

As far as the insurance company was concerned it didn’t really matter how much they were used for private use and their only criteria for establishing that it was for private use was if there were games installed on the computers and - being computer geeks - of course there were.

So that was the situation on Monday morning … when I dropped the laptop and of course it fell on the side where the wireless card was plugged in. After the fall the wireless card was pushed much further in than it normally goes.

I powered up the laptop and it worked, I tried to access the network and it didn’t work - time to call the insurance company.

The bad news was that our insurance company (RACQ - a very reputable company here in Queensland) does not cover anything for accidental damage if the policy is for goods situated in a house that is leased - we lease.

The company does not cover laptops for accidental damage, even if they are listed as a specified item, if they are used for business.

The moral of the story is - check your insurance policies item by item because the cover you think you have may not really be there at all.

One of the first, and now one of the biggest, web based email providers is Hotmail. These days just about every man and his dog has a Hotmail account but have you ever wondered what is going on behind the Hotmail screen as you access your Hotmail account?

When a user logs into their Hotmail account they are actually taken to one of more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe. To manage that huge number of computers Hotmail employs less than 100 systems administrators to keep the system running.

If you are interested in finding out how it all works here is a link to an interesting interview with one of the senior Hotmail managers.

How do you store your business records or family photos? What about your music or videos?

These days, with so much of our business packed into that whirring computer box, it’s only natural to think to storing your data on CD or DVD. After all, these days every computer comes with a CD or DVD burner so why not use it to store your data?

We certainly do, we have business records and important business files stored on CD going back as far as 1998. We also have a lot of our family records stored on CDs. Treasured photos, important family history papers going back to WWI have all been scanned and burnt onto CDs.

We have always known that CDs are prone to fail after a few years. I’ve mentioned it here before that cheap CDs are not ideal for storing important files because they deteriorate after just a few years. But now it seems that experts are also suggesting that good quality CDs are not ideal either.

Long term storage on hard disks is also not recommended because mechanical failure is quite likely.

Kurt Gerecke, a data storage expert with IBM, suggests that the only safe way to store important data is via magnetic tapes. He suggests that even good quality discs are unlikely to last beyond five years and el-cheapos bought at the local discount store are not going to last more than two years.

You can read the full story here at Computer World