(If you are looking for first-class IT support in London, please feel free to contact us)
We carry around a lot of software on our USB keys these days in order to assist in doing our job. Here is the main selection of the software we keep on it.
The BBC have done a report on unsecured wifi networks in the UK. There's still a huge number of people running unsecured wireless networks. Sometimes while on a customers site in Central London I will see up to 10 networks surrounding me and quite often a good 1/4 of them are unsecured.
When I did my own informal walk around London with my PDA on the 28th July last year, (I commented on it here at the time) I came across on one street near me and I picked up 46 unsecured wireless networks on that one street alone. Admittedly I didn't check it out thoroughly, so I didn't check whether they were locked down by MAC address, and at least 12 of them had the same name so I'm sure they were part of a hotspot network. But it was still an eye opener.
It does stagger me that unsecure networks still exist in such a dense population centre such as London. I think it's possibly going to take a criminal using someones Internet access point to commit a high profile crime to draw attention to the issue. The problem I think is getting better as more access points and routers have easy setup procedures that include WEP/WPA setup etc, and I've seen myself that it's certainly been improved by ISP's since I made that comment 8 months ago. But it's going to take a while before the existing unsecure setups get outmoded and replaced.
I've been a Microsoft Windows user for many years - I've grown up with it from using 286's with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 at University.
Time has moved on and GNU/Linux has become more usable, powerful and has some features and applications that make it indispensable as an Operating System today - I find myself using it more and more for certain tasks. Mostly server based, but I've gradually become more impressed with it as a desktop, especially since Ubuntu reached version 6.06 (Dapper Drake)
Now I'm always happy to use the right tool for the job, there's no Windows/Linux fanboy in me. However deciding on GNU/Linux at home is a personal choice due many reasons, including the licensing controversy surrounding Vista, price and DRM amongst others, and I simply don't wish to go with it. Since now 95% of the little gaming I do is now done on consoles (Damn you, Counter-Strike: Source and while I'm writing I'm currently on an Eve Online trial.) as it is the only software area that GNU/Linux can not reproduce as effectively at the moment. I felt it was time to make the move.
The end result I was looking at is total migration to GNU/Linux, at home for every application I use with any Windows applications running under WINE or as a last resort, on a Virtual Machine. I still use Windows at work (where I can control the machine and put whatever applications I wish to use on it anyway).
So I'm now on step 7 and doing quite well thank you. This step-by-step progression is quite a common sense approach, but what is obvious to some people isn't necessarily to others and so I list it here for those that could use a nudge.
This article suggests what we already knew (and what our customers quite often suspect) - Norton's products grinds your machine down to a snails pace while "Nod32 gets good security reviews and seems to leave the system fairly nippy".
The article and it's conclusion.
A few years ago, one of our clients needed to replace their old office workstations. Great we thought and prepared a quote for 5 new Dell workstations with flat screens.
Since their office is quite small - it's in Regent Street (a high rent area in Central London) - we gave them the option of a small form factor Dell Optiplex SX270 to save space in the office.
The SFF SX270 looked the business and the customer was keen due to its small footprint.
This, in hindsight was a mistake as almost 3 years later we are still paying for.
The upshot is, of the orginal 5 purchased - 4 have been replaced with new mainboards and had Dell engineers on site. Thank goodness we always recommend 3 year onsite warranty. (This expires in about 4 months!)
The moral we are taking from this is to buy normal desktop/towers from decent manufacturers and learn from your purchasing mistakes! We now use a combination of Dell and HP business grade units and experience an acceptably (very low) number of failures.
And if you have a SX270, when it fails insist on a warranty fix from the Dell call centre.
Here is a brief note about my recent experience with the trial version of ULead's DVD Factory.
The client who owns a large horse stud farm and wanted to edit and burn her digital videos onto DVD to send to breeders who were interested in her horses.
After spending the morning upgrading her PC with 2Gb RAM, Firewire, 20" widescreen LCD and a 300Gb Hard drive and then proceeded to install the ULead package.
The goal was to have something wizard and step driven that will allow my client, a non-technical person to easily create simple DVDs.
