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If you need a huge external hard drive to backup or archive video, image, or music files, Buy.com has the Calvary 500 GB external USB drive on sale for only $127.95 after rebate and with free shipping. Although perhaps not as elegantly designed as a LaCie external drive, the user reviews for this drive on the Buy.com web site are very positive.
If you need a decent pocketable digital camera, Computer Geeks has the Kodak C633 6.1 MP camera on sale for $89.95 if you use the secret savings code "GEEK633." This camera has a 3X optical zoom and comes with a free camera bag.
If you want some music to go with that camera, Buy.com has the very nice Sansa e260 digital audio player for just $105 including free shipping. This player handles audio and video, has an FM radio, a voice recorder, and 4GB of storage. I think it is a much better value than a 4GB iPod Nano.
I am no fan of Apple's iPod. There are better, or at least more versatile, digital audio player choices. I don't like being tied to the iTunes software or Apple's on-line music store. And I especially don't like the iPod's inability to play other compressed music formats such as WMA.
But one of the most frustrating things about the iPod is the lack of an obvious way to transfer music from your iPod to a PC. This is partly to deter piracy. But it also prevents legitimate transfers of purchased music from your home to office PC, or if your PC dies and you want to restore your music to a new or repaired PC from your iPod.
The April 10 issue of PC Magazine contains a tip on how to get music from your iPod back to your PC.
There are also shareware programs such as Music Rescue for $20 that add a bit more refinement to the process. iTunes will also let you play music purchased from the iTunes store on up to five PC's, but only one can be authorized at a time.
It is probably too late to help for this tax season, but having an easy way to scan the piles of small, folder, crumpled, and creased receipts that all small business owners (including lawyers) accumulate during the course of the year would be great.
A review in the April 2007 of Maximum PC magazine heaps praise on the NeatReceipts Scanalizer. This $230 sheet-feed scanner and software package is designed to let you easily scan receipts and business cards. It will even do full-size documents. The scanner is portable and gets its power from the USB cable connection to your notebook or desktop PC.
When I began speaking at CLE programs on law office technology issues in the mid-1990's, my standard advice was to stay with the operating system that came pre-installed on your PC. Each new OS had increasingly demanding hardware requirements, and the upgrade process did not often go smoothly.
In 2007, one would hope that this situation had improved. It has not. Many current PC's that are perfectly serviceable running Windows XP will not be adequate for Windows Vista (or at least won't run the new graphical interface called "Aero" that is one of the primary reasons to upgrade to Vista). But hardware suitability is only part of the problem.
Instead of two (or three if you count Media Center Edition, which wasn't available as an upgrade anyway) versions of Windows XP, computer buyers and OS upgraders must now select from four versions of Windows Vista. And the upgrade path from XP is anything but clear or logical.
First, XP Professional, which is what you should be using in your offices (and probably home too, but that is more debatable), can be upgraded only to Vista Business (about $200 for the upgrade), which lacks the neat Media Center features you may want, or the more expensive Ultimate Edition (about $270 for the upgrade).
XP Home can be upgraded only to Vista Home Basic ($100 upgrade) or Home Premium ($160 upgrade).
To make matter worse, upgraders have always known that a "clean" install of a new operating system was the best way to go. That involved backing up your data, wiping out your old OS, reformatting your hard drive, and starting from scratch. You could do that with upgrade versions of Windows before Vista. You just needed the install CD for the old OS to prove you were entitled to the upgrade price. There was a point in the clean install process where you would be asked to insert your old CD for verification. Simple!
Not so simple with Vista. The upgrade version works only if you are installing over an existing version of Windows (and then only if it is the version Microsoft has deemed is part of the proper upgrade path as described above). You can either pay a lot more money for the "full" rather than "upgrade" version of Vista, or you can go through the redundant step of reformatting your hard drive (after backing up your data), reinstalling either your old OS or install the demo version of Vista (from your upgrade CD, just don't activate it), then do the upgrade install of Vista. Yes, this is incredibly stupid.
The bottom-line is that if your PC is running fine with XP, stick with it. Save Vista for when you buy a new PC with Vista preloaded. And wait to do that at least until Vista Service Pack 1 is released and you receive confirmation from all of your software vendors that the programs you depend upon will run properly on Vista. That could be 6 months to a year.
If you happen to be at your local Target this week (and who doesn't visit Target at least once a week?), check to see if they have any more of the Imation 512 MB USB Pivot Flash Drives on clearance for only $9.88. This drive does not have a removable (and lose-able) cap covering the USB connector. Instead, the drive pivots (hence the name) out of an integrated cap that also has a ring for connecting to your key chain. Drives of this capacity are great for transporting files from office to home or creating backups of key files.
For larger backup duties, Best Buy has the nicely-designed LaCie 80 GB 2.5" Portable USB hard drive for $79.99 after instant savings. We've been using LaCie external hard drives for several years and they combine portability with reliability and a very appealing appearance. This model comes complete with backup software. If you are not using an external hard drive to backup your law office documents and data (combined with a reliable and automatic on-line backup service), you are taking a huge risk with the future of your firm. Buy two of these drives and rotate the backups off-site on an odd-day/even-day basis.
If portability is less of a concern, and you need a capacious external drive to store image or video files, Best Buy has the LaCie 250 GB 3.5" External Hard Drive on sale for $99.99 after instant savings.
As announced by ZDNet, a study by security researchers at Indiana University and Symantec have verified that hackers can sneak into the settings of the broadband routers used at home and by most solo and small firm attorneys to reroute Internet traffic to fake Web pages that may look like legitimate Web pages from your bank or favorite on-line merchant. This could allow intruders to obtain sensitive information such as bank account numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. The full details can be found here.
Fortunately, the hack works only if the router's default password has not been changed. Unfortunately, many solo and small firm attorneys never change the default password on their routers. There are many reasons to change your router's default password. This new hack only makes it more urgent and essential that you do so.
Devices manufactured by Palm, including those running the Palm OS and Microsoft Windows Mobile, must be updated in order to properly switch to Daylight Saving Time (DST) on March 11, 2007. Palm has announced the free downloadable updates. Devices affected include the popular Palm Treo smart phone series as well as the LifeDrive and many Tungsten and Zire models.
The updates can be found here.
Wireless networks are incredibly convenient. But they can also be a security risk unless you take proper precautions. The focal point of your wireless network is a wireless router. Most come out the box with little or no security enabled. But you can, and should, change that before deploying your network.
Among the steps you can take are:
These tasks are not difficult. For an excellent step-by-step set of instructions, go to the recent post on the Computer Geeks blog.
You would think that your new computer would operating at be at peak performance from the first boot-up. Unfortunately, new PC's often come from their manufacturers with so many unnecessary programs loading on startup that performance is anything but speedy.
You may recognize this glut of unneeded and unwanted software automatically loading into system RAM by the large number of unfamiliar icons present in the system tray at the lower right corner of your screen, just to the left of the clock. Unfortunately, there are other programs loaded into memory that don't display an icon in the system tray.
You can click Start>Run, type msconfig in the box, then hit Enter to bring up the Windows configuration utility. The Startup tab will show you what programs are automatically loading when Windows starts. Often the entries are sufficiently cryptic that you can't be sure if it is safe to uncheck (disable) the item, which prevents it from loading on startup. For more information on these cryptic entries, go here to run a search for the startup item in question. The search should provide enough information about the program to tell you whether it can be safely disabled from automatically starting with Windows.
