Latitude 34 Technologies was selected among many local small businesses due to our commitment to customer service, our passion for quality engineering and for our representation of small business in Santa Barbara.  We feel extremely honored to receive this award, especially during the month of our 5 year anniversary.  Latitude 34 Technologies has been honored with awards of similar stature each year since being in business, which is an amazing accomplishment.  We attribute our success to the team that we have put in place.

Our engineering staff is top-notch and our customers’ praise speaks to that directly.  As well, we have recently added the position of “Director of First Impressions” to make sure that each customer experiences a friendly, live person right from the first time they reach out to us.

We want to thank our customers for their loyalty and to those who nominated us to receive this award.  We work hard every day to bring the best quality computer support to our customers and we love doing it!

The award will be officially presented at a luncheon on Thursday August 18^th at Fess Parker’s Double Tree resort.  The keynote speaker is Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com and tickets are available through the Pacific Coast Business Times, Jennifer Hemmy (805) 560-6950 ext. 228.

Spirit of Small Business Article

1. Be concise!
2. Don’t use ALL CAPS—It’s rude
3. Be careful not to use too many abbreviations—not everyone knows what they mean
4. “Reply All” when you should and don’t use it when you shouldn’t—there is nothing more annoying than forwarding responses because someone didn’t hit the “Reply All” button or receiving 200 email responses not meant for you
5. Use “BCC”—that means “blind carbon copy” (it’s not the default setting to show this field, but it is VERY important when sending mass emails)
6. Don’t start a new message to respond to someone—the thread is the very essence of email communication
7. Use a subject—it’s helpful for the reader to skim his messages and decide priority
8. Plain text is much better than rich HTML—keep it simple
9. Use emoticons sparingly
10. Keep attachments under 5MB when possible

Today’s entry is a response to a question from one of our readers.

Calla asks: “What about electrical outages? A friend of mine had a surge protector but the electricity did something weird and she had to get a new computer. What happened there?”

This is a great question!

People often use the terms “Surge protector” and “power strip” interchangeably.  There is however a distinct difference between the two devices even though they often look similar.  A power strip is just that, a strip of power outlets that allow you to connect more plugs to one wall outlet.  A true surge protector on the other hand is a device that can help to protect the items plugged into it from power surges.

Power surges are spikes in the electrical voltage that can damage more sensitive devices.  These surges can be caused by anything from lightning strikes or even a return of power after an outage.  In some cases the surges directly precede an outage.

The job of the surge protector is to stop or redirect that spike in voltage away from the devices connected to it.

If there is no surge protector in place or if the one in place fails and there is a power surge the spike in voltage can reach your computer.  Typically the first thing it will burn out would be the power supply.  This is either the internal power supply in the computer (a device that converts the AC power from the wall to the DC power that your motherboard and other computer components use) or in the case of laptops the external power supply (similar in function to the internal supply on a desktop).  If the surge is strong enough and the power supply either does not have its own fail safes (or if it does and those fail as well) then the damage can make its way to various internal components of the computer.

The other side of this is that computer components (not unlike light bulbs) tend to fail when power is applied or removed from them.  The sudden loss of power that comes with a power outage can often be coincidental with a component failing (just as if you yanked the power cord out of the back of the computer while it was running).

The best thing to do in a situation like this is to take the computer in for proper diagnostics to see what component has actually failed.  A new power supply is often $70 or less.

The other thing to be aware of is that even if the computer has failed and will not boot at all there is a good chance the data on it is ok, so even if you have a backup to fall back on (you do have a current backup, right? you want to make sure you don’t toss out that old computer will all your data on it for someone to find a go through.

So, make sure you have a true surge protector (it should say “surge protector” or “Surge suppressor” on it) or even better get a battery backup for even better power protection (watch for our upcoming article on UPS battery backup devices).

Thanks for reading and please keep those questions coming.

First off I have to say I liked Windows XP.  I made the change to Vista several months earlier and was plagued by issues and incompatibilities ever since.  Making the jump to Windows 7 was more of a hope for the best in my mind, but I entertained serious thoughts of going back to XP or taking the whole office to Mac OS X.  But, we tried it.  We were running the pre-release and we (myself and some of the other engineers here) knew this was not the finished product.  Boy were we surprised.  Not only was it stable, it was far more stable, faster and more compatible than Vista had ever been for us.

I have to say that since installing the pre-release and then moving the to the full version I have never had a crash under Windows 7 and have not heard of one from anyone else in the office.  Now, when I say “crash” I mean the computer has never fully locked up and needed to be hard reset (or reset itself).  Applications have crashed, but they have not taken the computer down with them.

Here is one anecdote that happened within my first month or so of working with Windows 7:  I was helping a client remotely from my desktop PC.  It was right in the middle of helping the client when my screen went black…”oh great” I thought.  There are few things worse than telling a client that they have to wait because your computer crashed, it really does not look good as an IT company .  So I took a deep breath and counted to 5 before I did anything and that made all the difference.  The black screen flickered a few times, then, it was back.  I truly couldn’t believe it, my mouse still moved, I could click on things; then…a little message bubble popped up in the lower corner telling me that Windows had recovered from an error with the video card driver.  Windows then gave me the option of installing the latest driver (one that had been released only a few days before) and then took care of installing it. It did not even need to reboot after that.  So, that is my one, “almost” crash in Windows 7.

Besides the stability there are a ton of new usability and productivity features that I wonder how I ever lived without.  The search field under the start menu is an extremely useful way to find what I need quickly (I use it mostly for finding the applications I want more than for finding documents).  And the window controls are great with a multi-monitor setup.

Now, the other thing that makes Windows 7 so nice is the speed, even on older PCs.  We have a four year old laptop that we use for field work.  This laptop was one of the least expensive I could find when we got it and I never expected to get a lot out of it.  With 2 GB of RAM it is more useable with Windows 7 than it ever was with XP, not to mention it boots much faster.

The enhanced stability alone makes this newest offering from Microsoft a pleasure to work with, and the polish and all the little productivity enhancements quickly add up to help make your time with your computer much more pleasant while you get more done. So, if you are purchasing a new PC it is time to take a serious look at Windows 7.  If you have any specific questions about this new operating system from Microsoft we would be happy to answer them in the comments or via e-mail.

OK, so I only went as far as the England and Wales, but it was a thrillingly different experience than last summer when I hauled my laptop and Kindle along. This time, I left my wheely (it may not be in the dictionary yet, but just wait) carry-on home and took one 13”x12”x4” soft-pack bag in which my purse, camera, sweater, toiletries kit and iPad fit perfectly. Not having to schlep an extra carry-on was just the first of many conveniences.

The Kindle app allowed me to share all the books on my Kindle with my iPad and order more along the way. The backlit screen is easier to view in many situations than the Kindle, which requires a light source; when everyone on the plane is snoozing or viewing a movie, there is no need to turn on a reading light. In its protective case, the iPad props up comfortably either vertically or horizontally, making reading as comfy as it gets. (The only drawback, which applies to the Kindle as well, is the necessity to turn off your book during take off and landing.)

My personal and business email, which follows me everywhere, was easy to access and reply to in any wireless zone. (The roaming services are quite expensive overseas and best reserved for use in the U.S.) I did come across a hotel with Ethernet cables, which don’t plug into the iPad (no USB port), but there is almost always a wireless area in the lobby of such hotels.

Bottom line: No regrets about adding an iPad to my IT armamentarium, especially for its ability to streamline the travel experience.

Hard drives are amazing technology for storing large amounts of data inexpensively, but they are not the most efficient medium for getting to your data as quickly as you can.  They use a rigid platter spinning anywhere from 4,800 to 15,000 times per minute and a tiny head that slides just above the platter to read and write data by checking and changing the magnetic polarity of tiny specs of magnetic dust (really, I find it truly amazing that the majority of the planets’ digital data is stored as microscopic norths and souths on magnetic dust stuck to spinning plates).  Every time you access a file the computer has to tell the hard drive what it is looking  for.  Then the hard drive has to move the little read/write head on an arm out over the platter to the part where the data it is looking for will be.  Once there it waits for the data it needs to rotate under it so it can read it.  This is called “seek time” and it only takes about 10-20 milliseconds.  This may not seem like much but it has to be done for every file accessed, and when you are accessing a lot of files (when booting your computer for instance) it adds up–a LOT.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because what makes SSDs so interesting is that there are no moving parts, only memory chips.  So everything moves at the speed of light (or nearly so, you physics majors, etc. please cut me some slack .  “Seek times” on an SSD are under 0.1 ms. Where this really becomes apparent from a specification standpoint is what are called IOPS or Input/output Operations Per Second.  Typical hard drives are anywhere from 90 to 180 IOPS, which means they can’t read any more than about 90 to 180 files per second. If your computer has to read or check a few thousand files on boot, well, you can see where this is going.  It also shows why it takes ages for things like virus scans that have to check each of the several hundred thousand to several million files on your computer.

SSDs by comparison start at around 5000 to 8000 write IOPS and 35000 read IOPS, amazing!

What this means to you and me is that a computer (for instance the PC I am writing this on) boots Windows 7 off a hard disk in just under 2 minutes, but it boots the exact same OS (cloned from the hard disk to a SSD) and logs in and launches Outlook in under 20 seconds.  On my Mac laptop where my Mail program has ~36,000 mail items and takes about 3 minutes to open (it likes to compare the mail on my Mac with the server to make sure they are in sync), once I cloned to a SSD this same process took about 1 second.  Yes, you read that right from 180 seconds to one second.

Now, for all of you who are sitting there saying, “OK, so why doesn’t everyone have SSDs now?”, in a word: price.  SSDs are still much more expensive per gigabyte than hard disks and you can’t even get them in some of the larger sizes that you can easily get hard disks in.  That said, if your storage needs are small and speed is of the essence, there may be an SSD in your future.  Say you already store most of you files on a server at work, or you keep all of your pictures and movies on an external drive anyway and a 120GB drive is fine for your needs, then a SSD might be perfect for you.  Maybe you travel with your laptop a lot (the other benefit of SSDs is lower power consumption) and you want your laptop to boot fast, let you work quickly and then shut back down fast, if so a SSD is definitely a great idea.  Or it could just be a cost effective way to breathe new life into a higher end computer that has a few years on it (my aging MacBook is like a brand new laptop with a SSD in it).

So, if you think a SSD might be right for you, give us a call or send us an e-mail, we will be happy to let you know what your options are.

I work at computers all day long.  Often I am sitting at other people’s desks fixing their computers, but more often than not I am at my own desk.  Whether I am remotely helping a client or working on a project I am always happier when I have more than one monitor.  My second monitor is the one thing I wish for when working from home on the weekend or after kids are in bed (I try to not work too much from home, but sometimes emergencies need to be handled).  My laptop is great, I love the freedom it gives me, but the lack of a second monitor (or even a larger monitor) is a noticeable slowdown to my productivity.

Many years ago I was working for a similar company to Latitude 34 Technologies in Los Angeles.  I was an engineer helping clients and working on projects.  A lot of what I did was working on servers remotely.  I would connect to a server and troubleshoot an issue.  This involved a lot of tedious window switching and resizing so that I could look at and type my notes, check and compare settings and many other tasks.  One day the inefficiency of it all got to me.  When I had a few minutes I scoured the spare parts bin for a second video card, took an old monitor off the shelf and connected everything together.  My boss walked by a while later and gave me one of those “what the heck are you doing” looks, but let it go.  A few weeks later he was standing over my shoulder watching me work on an issue.  He didn’t say anything, but a week later everyone that worked in the office had two monitors on their desk.

My boss at the time saw what I had known and what many others out there have learned: two monitors can make you more productive.  How much more productive depends on how they use the computer in the first place.

Think about your day to day interaction with your computer.  Do you often refer to a website while composing an e-mail?  How about referring to an e-mail while you work on a spreadsheet or update a document?  Do you ever want to bring up two Word documents side by side to review them?  You get the picture.  These are all activities that can be greatly enhanced by having two (or more) monitors on your desk.

There are several ways to add a second monitor.  Many computers already have the ability to drive a second monitor; others need an upgrade to replace their existing video card to do so.  There is even the option of just connecting a new USB monitor adaptor (while not a great option for computer gaming, these can be a very inexpensive option).  Even my laptop will connect to a second monitor; there just isn’t any place to put it on the couch…

Widescreen monitors can be almost as effective as having two monitors, especially with the Windows 7 ability to automatically size a window to half the screen by dragging the title bar to one side of the monitor or the other (the key combo “Windows + right (or left) arrow will do this as well).

If you think a second monitor can help with your productivity, check into it.  If it helps you gain just an hour a day then it will probably pay for itself in no time and there are studies that show it can increase your productivity by up to 50%.

Personally I would go crazy with less than two monitors on my desk and I will be upgrading to a third and possibly a fourth shortly.

References and further reading:

Microsoft research:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/vibe.aspx

New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/technology/20basics.html?ei=5090&en=6fc17b9bf54ea2ef&ex=1303185600&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1145537733-/Kdyvqpu0/eVBVNBYUcsqg

NEC study (PDF file link):

http://www.necdisplay.com/gowide/NEC_Productivity_Study_0208.pdf

Rocky Mountain Communication Review, Department of Communication at the  University of Utah (PFD file, pages 31-35):

http://www.humis.utah.edu/humis/docs/organization_951_1147817063.pdf

MultipleMonitors.org A list of multiple monitor advantages):

http://www.multiplemonitors.org/index.php/multiple-monitor-solution/multi-advantages

The upside of wireless networking is  eliminating one more cable.  You also have certain conveniences like working from a conference room without having to hunt for a data cable, working from a coworker’s desk on your own laptop while they work from their computer or even working from the outdoor patio for a bit so you get to see at least a little sunshine during the day.  And all of this without having to string cables for people to trip over.

The downside to this wonderful convenience is that if you don’t have it setup correctly you leave your company open to attack.  In 2007 TJX (the parent company of TJ Maxx and Marshalls) found out the hard way that having outdated security on your wireless networks is not a good idea.  Hackers breached the TJX network through wireless access points on their network that were configured with the WEP (Wired Equivalency Protocol) encryption standard.  This standard had been cracked and considered untrustworthy in 2004, but TJX was slow to update its policies and systems.  Because of this slow adoption of newer standards, hackers were able to access the company network from the parking lot of a Marshalls’ department store and over a period of time made off with the credit card and personal information of more than 45 million customers.

Now, imagine if your business’s wireless network does not even have that level of encryption enabled.  Without securing your wireless network with a password anyone within range can access unsecured files on your computers.  They can even monitor the traffic on your network to steal and crack passwords that would allow them to get further into your systems.  Not to mention they can use your internet access, reducing your internet speeds.

I am not telling you all this to scare you into purchasing some bit of hardware or software that costs thousands of dollars or that takes hours and hours of consulting time to setup.  I am telling you because you can enable security that (with a long password) is currently secure against all but the most extreme circumstances.  In less than 5 minutes you can enable this security on whatever wireless device you have at the office or at home.  If it does not have the options I am about to tell you then you have had it for over 5 years and it is time to replace it anyway.

What you want to look for is called WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption or WPA2 (the newer, stronger version of WPA).  WPA requires a password of at least 8 characters, the more the better.  There are two options for WPA: personal and enterprise.  The enterprise option requires setting up certificates on every computer.  Certificates are digital files stored on the computer that act sort of like keys or giant passwords.  These offer an even higher level of security with the trade off of requiring more management than just entering a password.  WPA Enterprise can be a good way to manage large wireless networks because it is a lot harder for someone to get a hold of the certificate than it is to get the password from another user.

Of course if security is of the utmost importance you might consider if wireless is worth any risk.  If you do have needs for wireless there are ways to allow wireless access to the internet or only to specific internal resources without exposing your entire network.  For instance, we have setup systems for many companies that allow wireless access in their conference room with little or no security for their employees and clients to use, but that access is for internet use only and is not connected to any internal servers or resources.

I hope this helps you to carefully consider the pros and cons of wireless access at the office.  I am sure if you don’t already know the answer you will soon be checking to see what level of encryption (if any) your network is setup for.

First, a little history: Back in the day (10 to 20 years ago) a brand new PC cost several thousand dollars, but you could build a computer yourself with off the shelf parts for a fraction of that.  There was also little difference between the parts that were being used in the name brand PCs and in the custom built models.  Because of this there were many “home hobbyist” PC builders (those that built computers for themselves and for their friends and families) and companies that would build computers for individuals and other businesses.  The profit margins were great and everyone was getting a deal and was happy.  Let’s fast forward to the present day: things have changed, PCs are now a commodity item and are priced as such.  They are also much more complex and new hardware, features and systems are coming out at a much faster pace.  Gone are the days of a simple 200MHz Pentium Pro processor connecting to a 100 MHz motherboard, etc.  The math was much simpler then.  With the faster processors, motherboards, memory, etc. comes the problem of mismatched multipliers.  Basically what this means is that each component is working at a specific frequency (x number of cycles per second).  These frequencies don’t all have to be the same, but things work much better and much faster when they are at least multipliers of each other. When they are not properly matched up they will still work, but you can see issues in speed and stability.

Then you have the issues of driver compatibility, hardware compatibility, heat dissipation, electro-magnetic interference, and the list goes on.  The big name PC manufacturers have people whose sole job is to make sure that all of these things are accounted for, because if they are not it can result in large losses due to failures.

Today’s home user building their own computer for general use or a custom gaming PC can decide for themselves if they want to deal with the issues that come with this type of project: constantly upgrading parts, dealing with going to a dozen sites for drivers or worrying about which revisions of which hardware/software are compatible or not with the rest of the components.

A business owner should not have to worry about these sorts of decisons.  Nor should they have to worry about spending extra money on support due to these sorts of issues.  When you purchase a business grade PC from a name brand you are expecting certain things form the manufacturer:

-That they will be around if you have trouble with the hardware
-That they will have a centralized repository for updates to drivers, firmware, etc.
-That they will stand behind their hardware with a reasonable warranty and come to you to resolve the issue promptly

These are not things that you necessarily get with a white box PC.  You may or may not get a lower cost computer of the same quality with matching specifications.  For instance, while all Intel Core i5 processors are the same, all the motherboards they go into are not.  The same goes for memory, hard drives and most other components.

So, that is the long answer to why we at Latitude 34 Technologies don’t build the desktop PCs we sell.  Whatever we sell we want to be able to stand behind 100% and to have the manufacturer standing behind us 100%.

This is how computer systems work.  Your password is there to let the systems know who you really are.  Without them anyone could pretend to be you.  This brings me to the second comment I often hear, “I don’t need strong passwords, who cares what information I have?”  It is true, your information may not be what they are after, but impersonating you may be what they want.  For instance, maybe they want to use your e-mail to send SPAM to all your friends, or maybe they want to use your computer as a remote drop-point to move illicit data (credit card numbers, copyrighted data, or worse).  Even if you are not the one doing it, suddenly you are an unwilling accomplice.  So, even if you don’t think you have anything anyone would care about, you do.

So, with all that said, how do you protect yourself without driving yourself crazy?  There are a few steps that you can take to create passwords that are both strong and easy to remember and we will go over those in a moment.  The second thing is where and how you store your passwords.

There are several ways to create a strong password (I will go into the technical details of why longer passwords are good in another article).  The three methods I recommend are the passphrase, initialization and word combos.  Passphrases are just that–a phrase where you would normally use a word.  Initializations are groups of initials (first or last) from a phrase or sentence. Word combos are groups of two or three words preceded, connected or followed by numbers or special characters.

Here are some examples of the three types of passwords we like our customers to use:

Passphrase: BoyDoIGetGreatServiceFromL34Tech

Initialization: bdiggsfL34!  (note: these are the initials to the words in the previous passphrase example)

Word combo: AwesomeService!

While the passphrase is a bit much to type it is by far the most secure.  I used mixed case letters for the example to help highlight the words, but in a passphrase of this length it does not matter much if you have a mix of upper/lower/numbers/etc.  These are all great passwords and the word combo and the passphrase are nearly unbreakable as Windows passwords.

Now that you know how to create a strong password where do you store it in case you do forget it?  One way is to store them the old-fashioned way, paper and pen, and keep that paper in a safe place (lockbox, safe, under the bed, etc.).  This is good, but not always convenient.  Another method is to use a password storage program.  This allows you to have one master password that unlocks all of your other passwords.  There are several applications for Windows and Mac platforms that can take care of this for you.  These keep your passwords safe in an encrypted file that you can backup to a flash drive or print a hard copy backup of your list.  These systems are very useful if you do most of your work from one computer.  Don’t confuse this with the built-in website password storage in most web browsers.  Web browser storage is not encrypted by default and is the first place a virus will look if your computer gets infected.

So, today we learned to use passwords, make them strong and store them should you forget them.