Proactive Networking Blog

The economy is in the tank.  The recession is “real”.  Guess what, small business keeps on trucking.   Why is small business is the least effected by the downturn?  Because small business owners are practical.  They are cautious.  Are you taking advantage of the competitive advantages that technology can bring to your business?  Now is the time to seize market share.  Is your glass half empty or half full?

Here are a few links to some open source or free products available for small business.

Genbook - Free online scheduling for small businesses. Accept online appointments on the web.

GotoDaily - Find and share coupons, coupon codes, hot deals, promotional codes, and discounts for thousands of online stores.

CollectiveX - Create a Groupsite for Anything!

MindMeister - Collaborative Online Mind Mapping

Give me a call if you need help setting any of this up

I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron.  I usually work from my desktop, but wanted a little flexibility when I wasn’t at home.  The base model came with a few good things, but I definitely wanted to upgrade some things like the Digital screen, integrated webcam, and of course integrated bluetooth and travel mouse.  Three months out I can’t be more please with my purchase.  Of course saying this you have to realize that this model isn’t your rough and rugged type laptop.  I use it for around home and when traveling.  It is not my primary computer so I haven’t loaded a ton of programs on it either.  I have the basics.  Office 2007, ftp program, Microsoft WebExpression and Skype.  So far so good.  Even running Vista doesn’t slow me down.  It has 3 gigs of RAM and a 250 hard drive.  For a portable backup PC I’m very happy.

I have found it interesting that Dell has an “Acquisition Department”.  Their job is to find new business for Dell.  We used to buy components from Supermicro and then build the servers that we supply to our clients.  At one point we quoted a client a Supermicro server and they shared with us the price they got from Dell for a similar server and we were stunned.  His cost was about 10% less than what our cost was to build a Supermicro.  Our client gave us the name of his Dell rep, who I then called. 

The rep interrogated me on whether we were already selling Dell, as he wouldn’t compete against another rep.  He then set me up with an account and we started getting prices for all of our new server business.  The pricing was always very aggressive and we sold about thirty units over a six month period, which I am sure is small potatoes for Dell.

After six months we were unceremoniously informed that we were being moved to a different group, one that would be “better able to cater to our needs.”  The bottom line ended up being that pricing was no longer competitive and service was non-existent.  When we had worked with the “Acquisition Department”, quotes were returned to us in minutes, and pricing was always at least 5% below what our parts cost was for Supermicro, and at least 10 – 15% less than the unit priced on Dells website. 

Pricing with the new sales group was just a few percent less than what you could get at Dell’s website and service was lackluster.  Quotes took days to get, orders were ignored, and four phone calls still wouldn’t get a rep to call back.

I called my initial rep back to complain and he stated that we could continue to work with him but only if the units were shipped directly to our customer and Dell would have to charge sales tax.  He could not sell to us for resale.  His department is only there to acquire new customers with great pricing and great service and then move them on to Dell’s standard reps.

I’m embarrassed to report that I fell for a Phishing email a month ago. It happened when I signed up for a new Yahoo! Search Marketing account. I signed up for the account and ten minutes later I had an email similar to the following email in my inbox:

There is an obvious part of this email that should have tipped me off immediately that I was about to be taken.  The email is not from yahoo.com.  It is yahoo-inc.com.  Close, but close will get your bank account drained.  The challenge for me was that I had signed up for a new Yahoo Search Marketing account just prior to getting this email.  I was in a hurry and just blindly clicked the link, figuring that Yahoo was requiring me to confirm my email address and since I had just signed up for a new account it must be legit.  The link lead me to a page that looked exactly like this:

This is the actual Yahoo Marketing Solutions homepage.  The page in the link in the email I received has been taken down. (See below)  The only way to have known I was in the wrong spot would have been to look at the url.  This one is correct - http://marketingsolutions.login.yahoo.com.  The one I clicked through to said - http://liveadsmscenter.com/adui.  other than that, the web page looked exactly the same.  Again, I was in a hurry and just saw ads and center in the url and didn’t think.  I had just signed up for an account, so it made sense that I do this, and I had other things to get on to.

The next day I got a call from my credit card company.  They wanted to know if I had made three $3000.00 charges to Yahoo!  I didn’t think so.  I had approved $100 per day for ads on Yahoo.  I could see one $3000 charge, but not three.  I logged in to my Yahoo Search Marketing account and instead of seeing all of the keywords I had put in, I saw dozens of keywords relating to mortgages and the ad spend had been raised to $3000 per day.

I quickly called Yahoo and  they locked the account.  They promised to refund the $9000, which they did in about a week.  At first I figured that I wasn’t stupid enough to have been caught in a phishing expedition as Yahoo suggested.  It became more apparent that I had when Yahoo support said that they did not send out emails to verify a users email account.  It became even more apparent over the next month when I proceeded to get an email almost every other day purporting to be from Yahoo Search Marketing.

It appears to me that the phishers send out so many emails that they are bound to catch someone at just the right time that it’s easy to end up a phishee.  If I get a notification from a bank where I don’t have an account, it is easy to tell there is trouble.  If I get an email that appears to be from my bank about a password problem, and I have recently changed my password, it would be easy to be distressed, and without thinking click on the link to fix the problem.

The obvious lesson here it never click on a link in an email.  Always type in the address of where you want to go, or use the link in your favorites.

I have been reporting the further phishing emails that I get to Yahoo and amazingly enough, the phishing site in the latest email I got was taken down within 48 hours of my reporting it to Yahoo.

If you want to continue answering mindless emails while you’re away on vacation, keep a few things in mind.  First, make sure you have access to webmail.  If you have POP email, you’re going to be frustrated.  Almost all hotels are blocking sending outgoing email from your POP account now.  This would be the time to talk your boss into RPC over HTTP email which is generally unaffected by firewalls as it talks over the same port that you surf the web over, and your hotel is probably not going to block that. (This type of setup requires you to bring your own laptop, use Outlook 2007 or 2003, and for your company to have a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or 2007).  In my opinion this is the slickest way to do email that there is.  It also has the nice feature of seamlessly syncing your Smartphone, your laptop, your desktop, and Outlook Web Access, when all else fails.  You delete an email on your phone, it’s gone from your laptop and the rest of your devices.

If a new Exchange Server is not in your budget, and you have a POP account on your laptop, take the address of your ISP’s webmail service or your company’s Outlook Web Access URL with you, at a minimum.   This will prevent you from spending your first hour of vacation getting IT support from the hotel desk clerk, or spending time on the phone with the hotel’s ISP.  If you like talking IT when you are on vacation, they can show you how to change the outgoing SMTP server on your laptop to their ISP’s server.  Change it back when you get home.

Connect to the internet with a wire whenever you can.  If your wireless connection is not strong, you will be annoyed.  A low signal strength wireless connection can play havoc with your ability to get anything done, and can make you think that your laptop is on the fritz.  Go to the lobby for the best signal, get your emails answered, and then get back and cannonball your kids in the pool.

Here are some links to free stuff to use on your business technology blog:

Kontactr is a one-click free contact form service. It is incedibly easy to set up and use, its simple, and they provide the code for you to cut and paste. The best part is that is has built in CAPTCHA Protection to protect you from spam.

Box.net is a web-based service that lets you store files online, share with other people, and collaborate on projects. There are 3 types of service; Individual offers 1 GB for free!

Vimeo is a video sharing community. Kind of like YouTube but more Web 2.0. Free HD on the web! You can actually watch it in full-screen without squinting to make out what it is you’re watching…Vimeo has a simple interface, an easy uploader, and the option to let viewers download your original file.

FeedBurner is feed-based content and advertising. Recently acquired by Google, it is THE app used for RSS on your blog. If you don’t know, now you know.

In the first years of the decade we did a brisk business with upgrades to XP and Server 2003. I could easily find compelling reasons for clients to upgrade. So far with Vista, I am at a complete loss. Everyone at our office switched to Vista last year and (almost) everyone switched back to XP. I had Vista on my laptop and my desktop for three months. It was the most inefficient three months of my working career. Between long boot and hibernate times, and slow processing times, I couldn’t take it. This with fast dual core processors, 4 gigs of ram, and state of the art video cards. What kind of horsepower do you need to run this beast? Then the constant frustration with all of the settings being moved. Microsoft says that they moved things to make more sense, and that it is what their customers wanted. I’m wondering who these people are, because it just seems like change for changes sake.

What about features? Can anyone fill me in on what your average business user will gain by a Vista upgrade? I would love to be able to tell all of our clients that they need to upgrade, but I can’t come up with reason one. Sure, the aero glass is nice, the widgets are cool, and the new wallpaper is very slick. I’m serious here, I would love to be missing something.

An upgrade to XP, Office XP and Exchange 2003 got you RPC over HTTP. The holy grail in my mind. The ability to seemlessly sync your phone, laptop, office desktop and home desktop pc email. All of your contacts, mail, and tasks, constantly sunk, with whatever machine you happened to be at. Outlook Web Access even took care of you when you were at someone else’s pc. This feature I could sell, even if it was more complex than necessary to set up. Remote desktop of your XP Pro pc was also a very strong salable feature.

Unified Messaging with Exchange 2007 seems to hold some promise. Just don’t install any updates. Everytime we install any of the updates, someone has to spend the next four hours figuring out what the updates messed up. Of course, this has been my experience every time I have delved into a Microsoft 64 bit product.

Can anyone clue me in? Bill?

We have used Mozy online backup for a while.  We only use it as a supplement to a more robust backup strategy running onsite.  It’s nice to be able to look at a graph and see that all of our clients have another layer of backup.

Since EMC bought Mozy they have implemented  a “feature” called grandfathered storage and licensing.  Essentially meaning, there is a price increase, and all of your existing stuff is at the old price and all new purchases will be at a higher price and will be segregated between “server” storage and “pc” storage.  Obviously, server storage is more expensive.  It also is a bit more confusing as only server licenses will work with server storage, pc storage with pc licenses, etc.

Just one more thing to make something complex even more complex.  Thanks EMC.  I guess you do have to support all that overhead though..

I love the internal Sprint EVDO card in my new Dell D830. On a 10 day trip throughout western Colorado and Eastern Utah, it never let me down. Almost always had 5 bars wherever I fired it up (always within a town). No more worries about breaking the antennae off of the PCMCIA card.

Here are a couple of questions from clients regarding Windows Vista this past week.

“Im having trouble getting connected to wireless out in public (coffee shops, libraries and some airports). I have a relatively new router at home that works fine. What can I do?”

If you’re having problems connecting to public wireless, it may be because the router or access point is an old one that isn’t compatible with the tuning feature in Vista. That happens a lot with public Wi-Fi spots. If you disable the autotuning feature, you may get better wireless connectivity. Don’t worry, it’s a pretty easy fix:

1. Open the command prompt with administrative privileges (see our past post on how to do this)
2. Type: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable
3. Press ENTER
4. “OK” message will appear
5. Restart Windows (of course) to apply the change

To check to see that it disabled, type: netsh interface tcp show global at the command prompt.
To set back to the default (aka turn it back on), type: netsh interface tcp set global autotuningl=normal at the command prompt.

“I have 4 GB of memory (RAM), but the system only shows something like 3410 or even 2813 MB. What’s going on?”

Lots of people are confused about the RAM limitations in the 32 bit versions of Vista. The problem is that the 32 bit Operating System can only address a total of 4 GB of physical address space. That includes not just your RAM, but also peripherial devices (video cards, etc.) that are memory-mapped. Those devices get their address spaces first, and whatever is left over goes to your RAM.