Real World Computing

I've spent the last couple of months on Microsoft's Surface Book 4 (i7) and I've had enough time to form an opinion. I generally hate laptops but I've found the Surface Book to be fast enough and easy enough to do the majority of my work on. The touchscreen is very responsive and I love being able to detach the tablet from the base - though admittedly, I rarely have a good business reason to do it. We ordered around 45 of the devices all at once. One was DOA and another had batteries in the base that worked but dysfunctional batteries in the screen.  At around 4% failure it's probably still a reasonable return rate for hardware. In terms of general use, the keyboard and trackpad are fine and the display is very clear. The processing power of the device is good and multi-touch on the trackpad and display are great too. The pen is currently a little useless and gimmicky but I've recently discovered that it works with the current version of Corel, so I may ...

I'm often asked to tell people what to look for in a PC and recently I was asked to provide something in writing for all our staff members. These people aren't serious gamers and generally aren't all that computer literate (or computer-adventurous for that matter). I thought I'd share it with the rest of the world. Note that prices are in Australian Dollars and specs are as at 11 May 2011. I've ignored netbooks even though I personally find them cool. I've also mostly ignored non-windows platforms because as I said, these people aren't adventurous. Finally, where I've mentioned brands it doesn't particularly mean that they have my overall endorsement or condemnation. It's just my experience with them - and the "vibe" I get from other people who use them. What for? Throughout this document, you need to be thinking about the use to which you intend to put your computer. Is it just an office machine? Is it only for the internet and w...

How hard can it be to buy a server? I've been buying servers for years and I've experienced several types of purchases. The Cheap and Nasty This is where you go out to your local computer shop and buy a no-name, unbranded "glorified PC" server. Luckily, this practice seems to have completely disappeared from medium and large size business but it still goes on in small shops. The thing to remember about this approach is that they end up costing you in the long run. The best I can say about this approach is ... don't. If you really have to go down this track, then don't buy a server. Spend the same money on a good "brand-name" PC with a decent warranty - at least 3 years on site, and 4 hour response time. Also, make sure that you have good backup software and that you backup often. The Enterprise Special This is the exact opposite of the "cheap and nasty". You end up effectively paying $30,000 for what is essentially $10,000 worth of har...

Last Friday night, we installed a new firewall to replace our "unsupported" Symantec model. A Bizarre Sense of Timing Curiously, we'd been complaining to Symantec for years about several of their systems and had been slowly ripping and replacing. Our complaints over their lack of interest in the firewall they sold us had been fairly strong over the last six months but had met with limited responses. I got a call out of the blue on Friday afternoon from "upper" management telling us that they were now committed to sorting out the firewall for us. I had to tell them that their firewall only had three hours of life left. I didn't feel guilty though. I don't think that anyone should be willing to tolerate a lack of service. A Simple Swap-over We cleverly timed the firewall swapover project to coincide with a weekend where there was a scheduled power outage. This meant that instead of having one firewall (point of failure) on site, we had two. We spent a w...

Yesterday morning we got a defunct drive on our main Domino server. No problem, I called IBM and they arranged to send out a replacement drive within 4 hours. We got the drive within about 3. (Good Job). I mentioned to my boss that although the drive was a hot-swap drive, there was a chance, however slight, that it could bring the server down. This is my standard disclaimer nowadays. Well, I removed the old drive and waited about 30 seconds before plugging in the new one. Instead of the expected rebuild operation, the RAID controller flagged the new drive as defunct and Windows Server 2003 obliged by giving me a blue screen of death. Great... I had a look at the packaging that IBM sent... Reconditioned Drives... not good. I don't begrudge IBM for using reconditioned parts but I think it is a little bit cheeky. At Any rate, following a call to IBM was told to update the firmware on the drives as the replacement drive have shipped with the very latest. Isn't that just a typi...