Greetings – I hope everyone is enjoying the weather! A couple of quick notes: Swine Flu imminent The World Health Organization has just raised their pandemic alert level to 5, meaning widespread Swine Flu is imminent. The jury is still out on how serious of an illness this is, but there’s a very good chance [...]
IT service competition in Seattle is intense. In order to better compete, nearly every IT service & support firm has thrown the word ‘monitoring’ on their website without really explaining what it’s for or why you want it. Network monitoring was once the domain of only companies who purchased expensive monitoring solutions (like us) but [...]
12.31Happy New Year!
Greetings! Before the year finishes up, I just wanted to drop you a line regarding a few items: Microsoft Patches A few weeks ago, Microsoft released the largest set of patches in some time during their monthly “patch Tuesday.” About a week later, Microsoft issued a new critical patch to their Internet Explorer web browser. [...]
Here’s an excellent overview of the new BlackBerry Storm: a touch-screen phone which is meant to directly compete with the Apple iPhone. Research in Motion has added a mechanical “click” to the touch screen to give tactile feedback when onscreen buttons are depressed, unlike the iPhone’s hard, flat screen. But this reviewer says it’s not [...]
11.13Safe Computing
We’ve run into some pretty serious spyware/malware/virus infections lately. These infections can often be prevented by following the steps outlined below. While we are constantly taking steps to prevent infections on our contract customer’s networks, (such as deploying new antivirus software on the workstations and firewalls), we need every user to exercise caution and take [...]
Microsoft issued an ‘Emergency’ security patch a few weeks ago, an event which has only happened four times since 2006. While Microsoft can sometimes release a dozen critical security fixes each month, this one warrants special attention. A vulnerability was discovered in the ‘Server’ Windows Service, a common component to all 32-bit/64-bit versions of Windows [...]
Determining which infrastructure products to use on a network can be extremely difficult. Take for example, corporate anti virus & backup software: there are dozens of options available and everyone will gladly share articles and reviews claiming their product is the best. Some people now claim that antivirus in particular (a.k.a. ‘client security’ software) has [...]
Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista is finally here! This is the official announcement that will likely motivate larger companies to start adopting it at a much quicker rate. For more info (and instructions on how to get it), read this post from the Windows Vista Team Blog. I’ll post more information about this very [...]
Confused about the different versions of Microsoft Office 2007? Here’s how they stack up against each other… Bookmark It Hide Sites $$(‘div.d18′).each( function(e) { e.visualEffect(‘slide_up’,{duration:0.5}) });
08.09vista: almost ready.
By now you know we’ve actively recommended against using Windows Vista in a business environment. But things are finally looking up! I had a hunch Microsoft would, around fall, release a series of “magic” updates that would take care of most of the common problems with Vista –probably before they released an official Service Pack [...]