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.
We’ve used Google Adwords extensively, for ourselves and many of our clients, but have not tried Yahoo Search Marketing until two weeks ago. I had always read that Google owned this category and that there was no point going anywhere else. Recently, after Microsoft made an offer for Yahoo, I heard that Yahoo Search Marketing has as much as 25% of the search market. Based on our results with Yahoo so far, my guess is that my initial perceptions are still correct - Google owns search.
At any rate, we had a very interesting experience with Yahoo over the past two weeks. I signed up for a Yahoo Search Marketing account on a Monday. I added a test ad group for one of our clients and put $100 on account to start the test. This client of ours has an extensive ad campaign set up in Google and spends over $100 per day on Google Adwords, average CPC is about $1.30. I set up the Yahoo ad group with a dozen of the best performing keywords from Google, and our best performing Google ad, that most closely matched these keywords. Interestingly, the CPC for Yahoo, for similar keywords was only 24 cents. So, at least Yahoo gives you a discount. We got nowhere near the traffic we get on Google.
After three days of running ads, we noticed that Yahoo had charged an additional $3,600.00 to our company credit card. I logged in to our Yahoo Search account and found that my Ad Group was gone and now there where dozens of keywords about loans, and the ad spend had been raised to $3,000.00 per day. I quickly called Yahoo. They immediately shut down the account. They promised to credit the card and re-setup the account within a couple of days. I asked how this could have happened and they said that I had fallen for a Phishing email. At this point I was incredulous. I had only had the account for three days, what were the odds that a Yahoo Search Marketing phishing email would have arrived in my Yahoo email account during that time. I said that I had responded to an email right after I signed up asking me to confirm my account. They told me that they don’t send confirmation emails. Thus, apparently I had fallen prey to a phishing attack.
The thing I find interesting is what are the odds that I get a phishing email purporting to be from Yahoo Search within hours of signing up for an account. In my opinion, this has inside job written all over it. Yahoo said they would look into it. To their credit, they did refund the money and re-setup the account. I’m not convinced they believe my “inside job” thoughts. The rep who re-setup my account, started to give me a stern tutorial on not falling for phishing emails. I told her my story and she said, “What are you getting at?” She did tell me Yahoo was looking in to it…
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:
- Open the command prompt with administrative privileges (see our past post on how to do this)
- Type: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable
- Press ENTER
- “OK” message will appear
- 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.
If you have ever seen the Mac commercial were PC has upgraded to VISTA and has to go through his security guard for every request, then you know how true that is with VISTA’s UAC. It is relatively easy to disable this feature, and can help cure that sense of panic when the screen starts to darken and you think “Oh no what is wrong?”
The first thing you need to do is to go to the start menu and choose Control Panel.
In the Control Panel choose User Accounts.
In the User Accounts window choose User Accounts again.
Once on the “Make changes to your user account” window, choose Turn User Account Control on or off.
This takes you to another window where you uncheck the “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer” and press OK.
That should do it! You may need to restart Vista for the changes to take effect. Good luck!
Back in the “good old days” of XP, you could open the Task Manager by pressing the Control + Alt + Delete keys on your keyboard. In Windows Vista, you’ll open what’s known as the Secure Desktop with that key combination.
If you want to open the Task Manager directly, press Control + Alt + Escape (CRTL+ALT+ESC). Presto!
How to create an administrative command prompt shortcut
In Windows Vista, if you are logging in to your computer using a limited user account (which is great for security reasons) and you want to run something from the command prompt that requires administrative credentials, you have to open the command prompt as an administrator. You could right click the command prompt executable and select Run As Administrator but if you are a heavy command promt user, there’s another way: you can create a shortcut and modify it so you won’t have to right click and select Run As every time:
- Create a command prompt shortcut on the desktop.
- Right click the command prompt shortcut and select Properties.
- On the Shortcut tab, click the Advanced button.
- Check the box labeled Run As Administrator.
- Click OK.
Now whenever you click this shortcut, it will open the command prompt with Administrative privileges.
