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An email address is pretty much a necessity these days and there are plenty of ways to get one. When you sign up for broadband with an ISP (BT, for example) they will typically offer you an email address. I still come across a lot of people using these addresses, but I would like to put the case for why using this (certainly as your main contact address) is a very bad idea no matter if you’re a consumer or a business.
The Lock-In
At least one of the reasons applies equally to both consumers and business and that’s simply that if you move providers, you can’t take your address with you. That might not sound like much, but remember how many services you sign up with using your email address. What happens if you forget a password and want to reset it? Or miss an important reminder/update as the email address not longer exists? What about all those people who have you in their contacts under that address?
And it’s not just you, there’s everyone else in the family/business who uses addresses for the service.
For businesses it’s even worse, not only would a change in ISP mean you’re uncontactable, it may end up costing you a lot of money in missed business or fines/charges because you didn’t receive important emails.
So what happens? Well, you end up being unable to move for fear of losing emails, so you can’t switch to take advantage of better deals elsewhere, so it ends up costing you money (and hassle if the service is particularly poor). Continue reading…
12th January
I was reading an article calling for the government to make more use of open source software and it rang some bells. I’m the IT Manager of an SMB, so I’ve usually got one eye on our spending and am looking for ways to cut those costs. As such I looked at converting our business to run on open source alternatives, possibly not across the board, but as we have a split between what those at head office use their PCs for and the much simpler tasks required at the branches, I thought it could potentially help save money.
Evaluating Costs
As we’ve already bought the hardware and they came with licenses for Windows there wouldn’t be any direct saving in the costs of the operating system if we switched to another one (Linux for example). Even on new machines, the cost difference between a machine supplied with Windows and without is about £70 (assuming you can find a vendor who sells machines without it) which equates to about £1 a month over the typical three-year life of hardware. Not exactly massive.
We could potentially (perhaps unadvisedly) save the cost of our anti-virus software. Longer term there are potential cost savings in being able to continue using the existing hardware when Microsoft stops supporting XP in 2013, certainly the existing machines will not support even Windows 7.
Against it I had to weigh the cost of the extra time it would undoubtedly take to support users on a new OS. Continue reading…
5th January
I’ve previously reviewed Google Apps and as we (the business I work for) decided not to use it, but instead have moved to Office 365, I thought it might be time to give that a review as well (as there seems to be little input from actual business users).
We’ve been running our business on Office 365 for several months having signed up not long after it launched (we had completed a trial first). We were previously with Intermedia for hosted Exchange email/calendars and Sharepoint for our intranet site, but they were more expensive and we also felt Office 365 offered a better experience (user administration on Intermedia was very slow and clunky).
I’ll try and keep the run-through similar to the Google Apps review for easy comparison.
Reminder of Requirements
We have a head office and a number of branches. The branches only have one Office user, who only uses email and calendaring with Outlook, which is the only part of Office they have installed.
At head office the use is much greater with everyone using Outlook email and calendars, shared documents on Sharepoint and use of many of the Office applications, using some of their power features.
We were happy with the Exchange/Outlook combination but our existing provider were not looking they they would offer the integrated experience of Office 365, they were more expensive and their support was slow and unresponsive when we talked to them about upgrading our accounts (as Exchange 2010 users were paying less that we were stuck on 2007). Continue reading…
18th December
I’ve had these adapters for some time, they were the first gigabit adapters on the market and at the time I was interested in streaming some HD content. As these were five times faster than most of the others on the market, I thought I would give them a go. Incidentally, they replaced the Devolo’s I’ve previously reviewed.
As with any other powerline network adapter I’ve used (and I’ve used a few) there was zero setup, plug them in and away they go, the only concern was the speed.
Now, I didn’t expect to get gigabit speeds, nothing in networking gets the speeds they say (for a variety of reasons), but even if they gave me 20% that was 200Mbps. I have been suspecting for some time that they weren’t performing anywhere even near that well and I happened to have a pair of LEA 200Mbps adapters so thought I would give them a comparison test.
The two computers I was using both had gigabit network adapters and, while one was plugged straight into the adapter, one was connected through a gigabit switch. I downloaded and used Lan Speed Test to give me the figures. Continue reading…
4th December
I’d been thinking about buying a small low-powered PC I could use as a server for a while, but I couldn’t find one I liked, one that was fanless and not ridiculously expensive (or at least too expensive for what I considered its worth).
I like my Acer Aspire Revo R3610, but it’s way too noisy to be left on permanently. I had initially passed on the XS35, I think because of a prejudice against Shuttle liking to use custom parts rather than standard ones, but I came back to it and eventually took the plunge.
Part of the reason for picking the XS35 was it’s fanless. Quite a few systems stated they were silent, but when you got into the specs they still had fans, not a recipe for silence in my experience. The XS35 has no fans. I was going to put an SSD in it and run it with no moving parts at all, but the price/performance of a 2.5″ drive was too good and my experience with the Scorpio Blues is they are silent for all intents and purposes. So the machine runs totally silent, only the (overly) bright LED on the front indicates it’s on.
Continue reading…
18th June
