BaerConsulting LLC Blog

First, we’d like to apologize for not keeping up with the Tip of the Week category. It’s football season and we made the grand mistake of putting them out on Monday nights. We’ll try to keep up to date with them from here on out….it just may not always be Monday nights.

This week, we’d like to talk a little about wireless keyboards and mice. There are a lot of mixed reviews out there pertaining to these technological wonders and a lot of them are not praise. We’ve run across many sets of wireless keyboards and mice and think that there’s no sure fire way to tell whether the one you’re buying is worth the money you’ll be spending on it. We ran across a $200 pair made by Logitech a few years back that was absolutely horrible. It simply wouldn’t stay connected to the computer. When it was connected, dropped keys and loss of mouse movements was evident and unbearable. However, we’ve since owned a few wireless Logitech wireless mice that performed like a dream. The current pick is a Logitech Performance Laser Mouse. Not sure of the model number as it’s not printed on the mouse (odd) but it’s widely available, very compact, and phenomenal battery life. We also have numerous sets of Microsoft Laser Keyboard/Mouse combos that have yet to catastrophically fail on us. This particular set uses laser technology as well, there seems to be a trend developing here. We’re partial to laser because it tends to play well with WiFi and Bluetooth. Bluetooth pairing is not fun and it’s something you’ll have to do countless times with Bluetooth keyboards and mice.

We’re hoping someone will make a type of WiFi keyboard and mouse combo that works with client software. It’s a little radical, but could you imagine sitting in your family room with your keyboard and mouse and controlling your computer on your TV? It will be one of the next steps in the evolution of computers.

The true tip here is to read reviews. Listening to other peoples’ experiences with the product you’re considering is one of the best ways to see if the product suits your needs. Stay away from review SPAM though. Review SPAM is when someone takes the features of a product and spins them to their unique situation. For example, someone stating “The mouse is uncomfortable” is a good example. This is an opinion, not a fact about the mouse. Someone saying that the battery life is awesome or that it sucks is not review SPAM, this is something that can be proven and is very rarely an opinion.

As computer technology evolves, so will cellular phone technology. Most of us can remember back in the old days of analog phones where the only screen you had was a small strip that gave you 6 bars indicating reception. It’s hard to believe we’ve come so far in 15-20 years. The cellular phone you have now is probably pretty close in specifications of the computer you had at the time of analog phones.

Processors and memory are getting smaller, thus, you end up with Smartphones. Blackberries, Windows Mobile devices, Palm OS, iPhone, etc. When thinking about purchasing one of these, one must take in to consideration the network that it will run on. You may have a computer that could rival NASA but is it really worth it if you have dialup? As a company, we’re partial to CDMA technology, primarily Verizon. There’s just something about GSM (T-mobile and AT&T) that just don’t work well for coverage, signal, and general performance of the network. Of course, that is dependent on where you will be primarily using the phone. If we rule out AT&T and T-mobile as options, you automatically rule out the G1 from Google and the iPhone from Apple (which rumor has it, Verizon will soon be getting an Apple phone but they cannot call it the iPhone for copyright reasons). Sprint is also one of those networks that just don’t work very well. That statement can be considered true mostly anywhere as we’ve never heard a good thing about Sprint. Their customer service is horrible, their network is unreliable, and their selection of phones is pretty bad. We’ve just ruled out the Palm Pre. Verizon’s selection is pretty nice and they do have some exclusive rights to some of the phones that are out now. The Blackberry Storm is a pretty decent phone if you’re in to the touch screen features and you’re willing to void your warranty with software updates that aren’t technically supposed to be out yet. They also have the new Blackberry Tour. They also have one of the best networks in the country. Our favorite by far.

When purchasing a new phone, you essentially can pick from 4 different options as far as operating systems go: Windows Mobile, Blackberry OS, Apple (which is based on OSX), and Palm OS. Out of these, we’d have to say it’s a toss up between Blackberry OS and Apple for the best of the best. Blackberry OS does tend to get bogged down and glitch here and there, but doesn’t ever seem to crash, while Apple has the opposite problem, it runs well, but has a tendency to crash from time to time. Windows Mobile has a lot of flaws particularly when it comes to speed. It seems a bit too bulky for the hardware it’s running on (Vista anyone?). Palm OS seems to be pretty decent looking and have heard reports that it has some issues with bugs, but that can be expected with any new OS. The Palm Pre is the first device to run Palm’s new operating system and, as with any new software, the bugs must be worked out. However, we have not had the opportunity to play with the Palm Pre, so we can not offer an objective opinion on the phone’s capabilities.

Just keep in mind that the coolest phone may be worth nothing more than a hockey puck on the wrong network.

Edit:

A gentleman kindly pointed out that I forgot to mention Google Android. This is yet another OS that is in its infancy. Google is making a wise move by trying to get Android running on phones under other networks, but it currently resides on one of the worst networks in the country, T-Mobile. Thus, it is still not one of the top contenders.

This weeks tip is about web hosting. When doing any sort of web hosting, it’s important to remember that the web pages themselves are typically compatible with any web server such as Apache, IIS, etc. Some may require plug ins to be compatible with languages such as CGI and PHP but the code can be read by any HTTP server. Our personal preference is Apache2 on either Ubuntu or CentOS with virtual hosting. Our very first blog post was about configuring a virtual host on Ubuntu 8.04 with Apache2. It may take a little bit of configuring and quite a bit of frustration, but once you get all of the tumblers to sit just right, that lock will open up and run for a very long time. Just goes to show you that the simpler router, may not always be what is best in the long run.

When entering any sensitive information in to a website, take a second to check the URL for the preceding “https://”, this signifies that the site is secure and, for the most part, your information will be kept private and confidential, a must have for those doing online shopping.

The ’s’ at the end stands for…can anyone guess? Secure! This means that the site is using an encryption algorithm to protect everything that you’re doing on that particular page. Most typically SSL, it scrambles your data so that only the receiving computer can read it. If you’ve ever visited a site, entered your credit card number, and then went to fill in another form on another website and a little box pops up below that text field with your credit card number in it, then you’ve visited and paid for items in an insecure manner. Anyone with a laptop and some ingenuity could have just grabbed your credit card number and put you so far in to debt, you’re dog will get repossessed.

Also, when shopping online, please use common sense. If the site is poorly constructed or just doesn’t look professional, do some research on the merchant. Things that should set off alarms in your head:

• Abundance of typos. A real website that is legitimate will have every single person they can find proofread that site for errors.
• Grammar mistakes. Read the description above.
• International sellers. Basically, stay away from merchants in Africa. Chinese merchants are also becoming more and more suspicious.
• Non HTTPS sites. Shopping from a non-HTTPS site is similar to mailing cash.

You wouldn’t give your credit card number to a hobo, don’t give it to a suspicious website. Google is your friend, do some research on the company, or a $25 item could end up costing you thousands of dollars.

Money, it’s what makes the world function these days. The old saying “you get what you pay for” doesn’t apply to every situation, but it’s typically true when it comes to computers. Sure, Ubuntu is free, which is great, but you will have many more obstacles when getting to a stable, reliable machine. Hardware is no exception. If you want a rocket ship, then build/buy one, but don’t buy cheap parts for it. Don’t sacrifice quality for money. If it will cost an additional $200 to get the name brand item, then splurge and buy the name brand item. Usually, you’ll get caught up in trying to save money, you sacrifice more on quality, which you will be paying for later. When buying/building a computer, just remember, “you get what you pay for”!

Anti-virus is an integral part of everyday computing these days. If you run Windows and don’t have anti-virus, you’re definitely going to get infected. These days, there are many programs out there that pose as anti-virus, but are actually a virus themselves. A few good examples are XP Antivirus 2008/2009, Vista Antivirus 2008/2009, and my personal favorite, Personal Antivirus. I like Personal Antivirus because they’ve actually made the program look exactly like AVG.

A good rule of thumb to follow is stay away from anything that you did not proactively try to find. If you find yourself getting a pop-up anywhere on your screen that says that you’re computer is infected and to click something to disinfect it, don’t click it. Immediately shut your computer down and take it to a computer repair shop. The longer you let things like that go, the worse the infection gets and more infections will be downloaded to your machine. Many infections these days can render the computer completely useless in less than two weeks.

A few legitimate antivirus programs:

• Norton 360
• McAfee
• AVG
• Avast
• CA
• Bitdefender
• MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware
• Spybot S&D
• SuperAntiSpyware

We do not, nor will we ever, recommend Norton or McAfee. First, their customer service is horrible. Second, the software itself is essentially a virus. We have worked on numerous computers that have expired Norton software on it and the computer is unable to connect to the internet. Because Norton was expired, it shut off internet access until it was removed or renewed. If you’ve ever had a virus, it basically does the same thing. McAfee is similar, if you shut of its services and reboot, you won’t be able to get internet access. Not to mention, both of them use a large amount of your system resources, even when they’re not scanning. Overall, we recommend to stay away from Norton and McAfee, but they are legitimate anti-virus programs.

If you ever find yourself wanting more storage space, adding another drive is always an option. Make sure that you know whether your motherboard supports SATA or IDE or both before purchasing another drive. Depending on the size that you are looking for, they can be relatively inexpensive or possibly even free if you have some “dead” computers laying around. However, if you’re using a business computer or have extremely important data on the drive, you may want to look at RAID or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives. Using RAID, you could strip your data and have both hard drives appear as one, otherwise known as RAID0 or you could mirror your data. Mirroring is useful if the hard drive crashes. You can lose one drive, and not even notice that it died.

The pitfall of RAID is that unless you have a very easy set up (i.e. an even number of same sized drives), you’ll probably run in to problems while setting up your “array” as you can see that we’ve had this week. If you’re using a complicated set up, we highly recommend buying a RAID controller. This is a simple card that can fit in to a slot on your motherboard and will typically be automatically picked up by your motherboard and can be configured before the operating system boots. The advantages are plentiful:

• Hardware RAID is the only “real” RAID out there in most peoples’ opinions
• Hardware RAID is pretty stable and isn’t affected by a corrupt operating system
• You have more options, depending on your card. Most software RAID options are limited and may not support the array that you’ll need to setup

Not to mention the time and frustration that you’ll save yourself from when using hardware RAID.

A list of RAIDs can be found at Wikipedia by searching “RAID”. JBOD is probably the most logical option when expanding storage.

Backups

It is extremely important to keep regular backups of your data in order to ensure you do not lose those files. “If you do not backup your important data, then your data must not be that important to you”. There are hundreds of inexpensive options to backup your data. If you have hundreds or even thousands of family pictures, a simple thumb drive will do with a cut & paste operation. Thousands of music files, you’ll want something like a Western Digital My Book. When you get in to movie files, you’ll want something larger than 500GB, typically. We are about to upgrade our 2TB NAS to a 4TB NAS with RAID 1+0. Roughly translated, that’s a total of 8TB in our NAS. It has been estimated that human brain can hold about 10TB of data. We’re 4/5 of the way there! But there is no backup for your brain. 10 years ago, you didn’t have to worry too much about losing pictures because they were all printed and you just always stored them somewhere. This day and age, most everything is digital. One that hard drive crashes or Windows becomes corrupt (it’s inevitable), those memories are gone!

Keep in mind that it is borderline impossible to backup programs, Microsoft Office, AOL, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Firefox to name a few. Just focus on your data, like pictures, documents, music, movies, etc.