As Christmastime approaches we are all wondering how to keep our lists small and our purchases minimal. The economy is forecasting a “drugstore” Christmas or even a DIY sort of giving mentality. One way to keep from spending unnecessary money is to NOT buy anyone you know Windows Vista. According to Fortune magazine, only two machines with Microsoft’s latest version of Windows appear on Amazon’s list of 25 top-selling laptops - the fastest growing segment of PC sales. Apple’s MAC OS X and Microsoft’s seven-year-old Windows XP dominate the roster. So, save yourself $260 and recycle those XP editions.

America’s 25 million small businesses are the heart of the American economy.  They produce 51 percent of nation’s private sector output, 47 percent of sales, and provide employment to over half the country’s private workforce. Since the beginning of the digital age, small businesses are personally responsible for the majority of computing resources and energy output. And while the result is an increase in productivity, there is also a financial downside in terms of power expenses.

In the past, small businesses hoping to go green were limited in their options by expenses and availability. As a result, around 1/2 to 1/3 of the 48 percent of the nation’s electricity and 39 percent of nation’s natural gas used for commercial and industrial purposes is wasted due to inefficiency.  That amounts to billions of dollars in electricity alone, with a large percentage being used by computing resources.

Now, after over a decade of this waste, new solutions are starting to appear.  As a small business, one excellent place to start is to use newly available products to adopt an efficient server infrastructure.  Many companies are offering exciting entries geared to help businesses small and large achieve this goal.

1. Energy Efficient Sun Fire Servers When small businesses grow in size and need dedicated mail service and file storage, they typically need to buy a server setup.  By the end of 2008, Sun Microsystems will have released several energy-efficient products, including the Sun Fire T1000 and Sun Fire T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology.  These new servers, according to Sun, will provide “30 times more performance while using one-tenth the energy and generating half the heat compared to products offered in 2003″.
2. Improving Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle With Containment Studies show that up to 60 percent of the power in a server room goes to cooling.  One green cooling method to consider is contained hot aisle cold aisle.  Hot aisle cold aisle is a best practice in which server racks are lined up with alternating rows with cold-air intakes all facing one aisle, hot-air exhausts the other.  This only provides small efficiency gains.  However, if you combine this with containment solutions such as plastic curtains, which separate the hot air from the cold, you can save more — up to 75 percent on fan energy by some estimates.
3. Low Watt Xeon ProcessorsIntel, the world’s largest microprocessor maker, offers several energy efficient variants of its Xeon processor, its 45 nm Penryn based offering.  The new processors come in both quad core and dual core varieties.  The dual core X5270 consumes 80 watts, but can run as fast as 3.5 GHz.  For quad cores, there’s the X5492, the X5470 and the L5430.  These models use 50 W of power, or a scant 12.5 W per core.  Powerful and efficient, these new processors are also halogen free, making their eventual retirement more eco-safe.
4. Consider The Switch To Linux Server OS Suggesting an OS is a tricky business.  In the server market the main candidates are Windows Server 2008 and the various Linux distros.  Part of the difficulty in making a suggestion is that some OS’s are naturally better at certain tasks, and some like Windows Server 2008 have some nice extra features.  That said, if you’re looking to save power, consider turning to Linux.
5. Putting It All Together As you can see, building an energy efficient server architecture requires a multi-tiered approach.  No one component will eliminate all inefficiency in the setup, but by selecting an efficient OS, low watt processors, an energy efficient server system, and efficient cooling that meets your needs, you can begin to save money and lessen your company’s impact on the environment.

I woke up this morning (rather early, I might add) to a phone call asking for emergency computer help. It seems the blue screen of death had attacked yet another computer and Safe Boot just wouldn’t do anything. After researching some error codes and some file threads I realized that the hard drive was just toast. Now, I am not done with the full diagnosis, mind you, but it served as a great reminder for backing up one’s hard drive and being aware of keeping your backup files current. So, I thought I would put this little reminder together.

Open Windows XP Backup

Windows XP includes its own backup program, although you may need to do some digging to find it.

If you use Windows XP Professional, the Windows Backup utility (Ntbackup.exe) should be ready for use. If you use Windows XP Home Edition, you’ll need to follow these steps to install the utility:

• Insert your Windows XP CD into the drive and, if necessary, double-click the CD icon in My Computer.

For more information, see How to Install Backup in Windows XP Home Edition.

With that chore out of the way, you’re ready to begin backing up. By default, the Backup utility uses a wizard that makes the process straightforward. To start Backup:

• Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Backup to start the wizard

Decide What to Back Up

You might be tempted to click All information on this computer so that you can back up every bit of data on your computer. Think twice before choosing this option, however. If you’ve installed a number of software applications, your backup could add up to several gigs.  For most folks, the My documents and settings option is a better choice. This selection preserves your data files (including e-mail messages and address books) and the personal settings stored in the Windows Registry.

If several people use your computer—as might be the case on a shared family PC—select Everyone’s documents and settings. This option backs up personal files and preferences for every user with an account on the computer.

If you know that you have data files stored outside your profile, click Let me choose what to back up. This option takes you to the Items to Back Up page shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

Select the My Documents check box to back up all the files in your personal profile, and then browse the My Computer hierarchy to select the additional files you need to back up. If some of your files are on a shared network drive, open the My Network Places folder and select those folders.

This option also comes in handy if you have some files you now you don’t want to back up. For instance, I have more than 20 GB of music files in the My Music folder. To keep my data file backup to a reasonable size, I click the check box next to the My Music folder. This clears the check box from all the files and subfolders in My Music.

Decide Where to Store Your Backup Files

On the Backup Type, Destination, and Name page, Windows asks you to specify a backup location. If you’re one of those geeky people with access to a backup tape, the Backup utility gives you a choice of options in the Select a backup type box. No tape drive? No problem. Backup assumes you’re going to save everything in a single file; you just have to choose a location for that file and give it a name.

By default, Backup proposes saving everything to your floppy drive (drive A). Although that might have made sense 10 years ago, it’s hardly a rational choice today. You’d need dozens, perhaps hundreds of floppy disks to store even a modest collection of data files, especially if you collect digital music or photos.

Instead, your best bet is to click Browse and choose any of the following locations:

After you’ve chosen a backup location, enter a descriptive name for the file, click Next to display the wizard’s final page, as shown in Figure 3, and then click Finish to begin backing up immediately.

Let’s face it. This is Google’s world. We just live in it. Google has revolutionized the ‘net, created an app that allows users to zoom in and out on Earth, invested in geothermal tech and done most of it without charging a penny.

One of Google’s slightly lesser known applications though is iGoogle. A homepage for those with a Google account, iGoogle is a customized homepage that can be populated with games, calendars, RSS feeds, schedules, headlines, stock quotes, etc.

So as we all struggle to leave less of a carbon footprint and green our lives a little, why not consider greening your iGoogle? What’s that? You don’t know how?

• Click the ‘Add Stuff’ tab to add green applications—all green search engines, daily green tips, a TreeHugger feed. They’re all available if you just type ‘green’ into the search field.
• After you’ve loaded up your iGoogle with green apps, you can make the homepage physically greener, too. Set the theme to All Black, or Classic Black, or the like by clicking the ‘Select Theme’ tab and searching for ‘black’ or ‘dark.’ This will help reduce the amount of electricity you use while you’re on Google—some estimates say using a black Google could save 750 Megawatt Hours a year.

Okay, okay. I know that when writing for techies I am going to get chastised for writing about Email templates. I realize we prefer text over HTML. However, sometimes those we love and care for the most want to go and get all cutesy and design their email. Getting your email to look great in all the major email clients can be a challenge though. Thanks to CampaignMonitor it has become a lot easier. In fact, they have done the work for us and provided the world with 33 cross-platform, cross-client email templates.

We have all heard the old adage “You gotta have a gimmick.” Of course I never thought I would see the day when it would become the mantra of an Internet browser. Of course, when you are Microsoft and you are seeing your stocks slip, your head honcho start taking time off, and your products losing retail placement, you begin to adhere to “by any means necessary” as well.

For those who don’t know, the BETA download for Internet Explorer 8 is out and it has some bells and whistles that have all the tech journalists talking. The first and most obvious of these is the “porn mode” in which when you browse in this mode, it leaves no tracks in your browser. It is rightfully called “InPrivate Browsing” but we all know a NSFW device when we see one. This may cause problems for technicians and troubleshooters as now we will have no idea where a malicious code was picked up or a virus downloaded from. We won’t even know what pages have been surfed.

On the flip side of the coin though this is a great feature for anyone who is uncomfortable with the rising Big Brother level of user tracking that online ad companies do nowadays. That stealthy monitoring is the obscenity everyone encounters on the Web. I mean, nobody really wants Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech companies following us around the ‘net, building customer profiles and targeting us with SPAM. This sort of privacy is long overdue.

Keep in mind, Internet Explorer 8 won’t restore the level of privacy that existed before the Web. It also won’t satisfy privacy fanatics who have more complex ways to mask themselves online. But IE8 will make it easier for average users to have more control over their browsing privacy…oh, and it looks attractive too!

I am pleased to announce that we now have a Facebook application available. You can find it by visiting this page and clicking on ‘Add Application’. The app creates a nice little slideshow of images posted to Ning by the MinuteFix community. We even have a little icon that goes in your application sidebar on your Facebook profile page.

I have to admit it was a rather drawn out process creating it but it was a lot of fun and just reminded me why I love this community so much. We are hard workers and we are dedicated to what we do. We finish what we start. I encourage each of you with a Facebook profile to add the app and show off those MinuteFix Places and Faces. (You can keep on inviting friends to the group page as well).

Oh, and speaking of pics. You can now upload Flickr images right to your Ning page with one click! That was added tonight as well. It is very cool and works exceptionally fast. So now none of us have excuses for not having at least a profile pic.

With the line between “work cell” and “personal cell” being more blurred than ever what can small businesses do about all the different devices that are sprouting up throughout the firm? Well, it can be a “every man for himself” mentality or the powers-that-be can put someone in charge of them all. The latter seems to make more sense.

That’s the advice the research company Forrester offers in a new report out today. Forrester says the new device-manager position is necessary because of the insurgence of laptops, and because of an increasing reliance by workers on smartphones and PDAs (of course the Blackberry, the iPhone and the Treo being the preferred devices). These new managers shouldn’t just babysit the devices and the hardware and software necessary to support them, but rather set policies so that businesses can make sure they’re helping workers get the most out of their devices.

Devices that workers keep on them blur the line between the professional and personal. A recent survey by Visage, which makes technology that helps businesses manage mobile equipment, found that 80% of workers with an employer-issued mobile device use it for personal purposes and 89% of people use their personal devices for work purposes. (which means no one is using their phone for the reason they thought they were purchasing it for, methinks)

Corporate policies haven’t kept up with such  boundaries: Most employers who issue devices pick up the tab despite the usage and there are few rules and regs in place about accessing corporate systems though their own devices. (”Forrester surveyed over 500 tech leaders and found a fairly even split between businesses that support employee-owned devices, business that put employees in charge, businesses that provide partial support, and businesses that don’t have a policy”, adds Ben Worthen of WSJ.)

Forrester recommends that businesses resist the urge to gain control by issuing just one kind of device or limiting what information employees can access. Instead, businesses should invest in technology and develop policies that make it easier to manage different types of devices.

Please Note: Much of this article including some paraphrases are credited to Ben Worthen of the WSJ Business Technology blog

As a Mac user and an employee of a company that currently services Windows exclusively, I have become quite familiar with the Parallels application. I am sure there are other users out there as well and we may even run into some as Technicians. It’s important then to know our options in terms of dual booting and running parallel operating systems. You can imagine my delight then to see the first update to Parallels that I am aware of in the last year. In fact, the newest version of Parallels supports Vista SP1, XP SP3.

Parallels, Inc. recently released a new version of its namesake application Parallels Desktop (3.0.5600), which includes support for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3. It also fixes some kernel panic issues, unusually high CPU usage, and provides improvements to Shared Folders. For those of you who don’t use Parallels, I can attest to the frustration of the overwhelming CPU usage as I have had to reboot on several occasions just trying to start Parallels. I would get a frozen app and a “not responding” error in the Windows…well, window.The point of Parallels is so that Mac users with Intel processors can run Windows apps alongside Mac apps. It works rather smoothly and has saved me on a number of occasions.

If you should run into this problem with a friend or a family member or even a customer, the update is free for existing Parallels 3 users, and is available as a 88 MB DMG package.

I think we’ve all had those networking moment where we are at a family function or a small get-together and we are talking about ourselves and what we do when that one ‘wall street type’ cousin or uncle asks if we have a card. Or maybe we’ve all been walking about and find ourselves in a place where our services our needed and show our professionalism by scrambling for a pen and a scratch of paper or the back of a receipt or something in order to write down our name, phone number and a web address. In short, no matter how digital we become there seems to always be a scenario when business cards are a must. So, why should being a Tech for MinuteFix be any different? It shouldn’t! That is why we are pleased to offer a template or two for MinuteFix business cards.

You can find your orange or white network goodness by visiting Your Account > Tools and scrolling down to the image of the two biz cards. Just click on ‘download the original photoshop files’ and you will find four editable .psd business cards with optional backs. You can put your name and your email and enjoy a more personal touch to your MinuteFix affiliation.

Where you have them printed is completely up to you, the individual, but we recommend OvernightPrints where you will find a very cheap offer for 100 1-sided business cards for $9.95. The quality is good and the delivery is quick. So, don’t wait. Get your business card printed today and let’s get to some networking!