Archive for Bay Area Computer Support
USB 3.0 Has Arrived. More Power. More Speed. Is Your Network Ready?
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USB 3.0 and Bay Area computer consultants X2 Technologis make your network run faster.
In chatting with Steve Mays, The Smartest IT Guy Ever, he was fired up about USB 3.0!
USB 3.0 is coming with 50% more power to provide for more devices and 10x the performance. What does this mean to you dear reader? It means that even existing devices like hard drives, not to mention newer devices like SSDs, will go faster and devices that charge with USB will charge faster and possibly not need external power bricks.
Real world usage of USB 2.0 nets something less than 20MB/sec on external hard drives, if you factor in the theoretical 10x performance gain that would be something like 200MB/sec which is right up there with RAID arrays and fast SSDs. (There are claims that the USB 3.0 protocol could go all the way up to an unbelievable 25 Gbps!!)
It’s a nice and frankly overdue by 3-4 years step.
The whole ecosystem of devices are coming out now: motherboards with USB 3.0 ports, laptops, PCIe cards, Express Card slots, adapters, hard drives, everything! Linux will have USB 3.0 support FAST and Microsoft/Apple will be bringing it on with their newer OS versions (Windows 7 and OSX 10.6) via patches.
Oh and did I mention that 3.0 ports are backwards compatible with 2.0 devices?
The Hippest Bay Area Computer Consultants on The Block!
Posted by: | CommentsCIOs Need To Benchmark IT According to Business Impact
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For years CIOs would look at me as if I had two heads when I asked them, “What would it take to turn your IT department into a profit center?”
They looked at me that way because times were good, profits were flowing and the funds – and staffing – was readily available to test new projects with or without clearly defined objectives and metrics to verify both the validity and ROI of the “pet project of the month.”
Then along comes a financial meltdown and 10.2% unemployment and suddenly not only are pet projects being cut but so are the needed enhancements to improve the viability and survivability of a firm’s IT, telephony and storage infrastructure.
This has forced CIOs to take a step back and answer some tough questions – and provide real numbers and a firm business case – as to how their department, their staff and their projects meet the overall growth and profit goals of their company.
According to Gartner, the IT agenda of firms both small and large will be dominated by virtualization, business intelligence and social media.
Additionally, we have seen and will continue to see, a shift from CapEx to OpEx spending for the next year as companies attempt to stretch their budgets by stretching their hardware while the economy is still working through the malaise. This shift to OpEx is made more viable as “cloud computing” becomes more reliable and vibrant. When computing in the cloud the emphasis is shifted from the hardware on the client side to the connectivtiy and bandwidth, which are both less expensive and able their costs are able to be distributed across all users.
However, literally millions of servers are beyond their scheduled replacement dates, which will increase the failure rate and potential for lost data and productivity of firms nationwide. And that could be the silver bullet in your budget planning arsenal when it comes to requesting increased funding for both CapEx and OpEx for your IT department.
Meantime between failure rates can be calculated and when multiplied by the number of servers, average length of outage and proft per employee per hour you have your business impact the CFO and CEO will want to see to justify spending money on IT.
For help in calculating those numbers or in extending the life of your current equipment, please contact us for a free consultation.
Prevent Windows Problems When Upgrading to Windows 7
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San Rafael Business Computer Support
To upgrade or “upgrade?”
Let’s say you have an office full of rather savvy PC users with systems that are 1.5 to 2 years old. Your laptops and desktops probably came with Vista but you probably downgraded them all to XP. These machines are probably running Intel Dual Core processors with at least 2 GB of RAM.
Now October 22 arrives and you’re faced with the thought of “upgrading” to Windows 7, Microsoft’s cover-up of Vista.
I put “upgrading” in quotes because upgrading usually means putting in a disk, keeping what you have without erasing your drive and starting over, and 45 minutes to 2 hours later you have an upgraded system.
For the majority of Windows 7 installations, though, you’re going to have to do a “Fresh Install.” With the proliferation and experience of most corporate users in the realm of cloud computing, SANs and NASs an disaster recover, this does not pose that big of a problem, but it can be a headache if not managed properly. At the end of the day, though, most Windows users will be familiar with fresh installs.
Personally, I typically do a fresh install on my Windows machines because it is faster than uninstalling all of the “crapware” that manufacturers have been bribed into cramming onto my shiny new PC. (We also recommended to almost all of our clients to stay with XP because Vista didn’t offer a large enough risk/reward return to tolerate the hassles.)
Now that Microsoft has licked its wounds and mostly recovered we see that Windows 7 isn’t all that bad and if you bought your machines after June 26, 2009 you are eligible for a free upgrade.
Keep in mind that with an upgrade you have to go with the bit version of Vista your system had. For example, if you had a 32-bit Vista OS you can only get a free upgrade to 32-bit Windows 7. The same holds true for the 64-bit Vista OS.
Likewise, the version of Windows 7 you may upgrade to for free also depends on the version of Vista your system has. So PCs with Vista Home Premium can upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium. PCs with Vista Business get to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional and machines with Vista Ultimate go to Windows 7 Ultimate.
Downer Announcement
If you have Vista Home Basic or Windows XP on your PC it is not upgradeable to Windows 7, which means you’re not eligible for a free upgrade.
The good news is that you can install Windows 7 on Vista Home Basic or Windows XP-equipped PCs, but you must do a clean install (versus an upgrade). This requires the purchase of a shrink-wrapped copy of the Windows 7 OS. You should also verifythat your system meets the minimum requirements for loading the new OS.
As with any upgrade, we highly recommend/beg/insist/stomp our feet and slam our fists that you back up your files and settings. You can use DVDs, external hard drives or attached storage but BACK YOUR STUFF UP before you do any type of upgrade. If you don’t have the time or expertise to make this happen please call us because we do. (A little shameless plug!)
