Archive for the ‘Computer Tips’ Category

The Open Source Dilemma

The Open Source Dilemma

In recent years, it has become common for many people to tout open source products and technologies for anything and everything in the modern business, and it often sounds too good to be true. While these products and technologies clearly have benefits, are there drawbacks, and how serious are they?

Like most technology decisions, going with an open source platform can be a double-edged sword. Many products from the open source community are just as powerful and capable as commercial products; while providing COMPUTER REPAIR BATON ROUGE, I see many people moving from commercial platforms like Adobe PhotoShop or Microsoft Office to an open-source alternative like GIMP or OpenOffice.

At the same time, things are frequently more difficult than they appear. There are differences in the way different applications operate, sometimes significant and obvious, other times subtle and unnoticed. The most visible changes create a retraining issue, where your employees need to relearn how the tasks they do every day are accomplished in the new software. The subtle changes can result in lost work, sometimes significant, because assumptions that were true about the old software simply are not true in the new.

One of the great myths of open source products is that they are subject to more security flaws than other software. This is another double-edged sword; open source software, because it is updated and released frequently, will indeed have more problems than commercial software. However, these same flaws exist in commercial software as well – they are simply identified and fixed internally, before an update is released.

It is a constant balancing act between how much time the team spends looking for problems, and how much time the user – you – spends having access to the updated technology.  The open source world generally prefers to give the user access quickly, while the commercial world prefers to employ rigorous testing.

While providing COMPUTER REPAIR BATON ROUGE, I’ve seen many customer sites work well with open source technologies rather than commercial technologies, but the single largest question – and one that is infrequently asked – is why, exactly, the move to open source is being made.

In the past several years, there’s been a real use of “open source” as little more than a buzzword. It seems self-evident that open source technology has benefits, but at the same time, few people bother to consider what those benefits are… and whether they need them.

One frequent need for IT SUPPORT IN LOUISIANA comes as a result of companies moving from one technology platform to another, not because it has a clear business benefit, but because a particular technology is new or seems “cool” to use. In the end, a lot of time and energy is spent trying to move from the old system to the new one, and the new system rarely has the same functionality as the old.

Keep in mind that what’s most important in any move from your current platform is not how cool the new system is, but the benefits it has for your business.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at COMPUTER CONSULTANT LOUISIANA

Choosing ASP or PHP for Your Web Site

Choosing ASP or PHP for Your Web Site

When putting together a corporate web site, one of the biggest decisions in the planning process is which technology to use for it. The two most popular options are ASP and PHP, but choosing one or the other can often be a chore.

Providing COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES, LA, I’ve seen plenty of sites running with each technology, and there are specific benefits to each option.

The single biggest difference between ASP and PHP is simply the server technology. While technology exists to run ASP websites on open source Linux-based servers, the only official ASP platform is IIS on Windows Server. If you expect to get reliable and stable performance from your ASP web site, you simply must run it on Windows.

PHP, on the other hand, can be run on several platforms. If you are already running a web server, PHP is very likely to be available on your existing platform, whether it’s Windows-based or not. So if you’re not already on Windows servers, or planning a move to them for other reasons, PHP is generally a faster and easier choice.

Many companies are concerned about the cost of development environments. It is commonly held, though incorrect, that ASP requires expensive development tools to use. In fact, ASP – like PHP – can benefit from a commercial IDE like Visual Studio, but can also be written in simple text editing applications like Notepad. Similarly, there are many professional-level IDEs for PHP which rival the functionality and efficiency of Visual Studio, available in a wide range of prices. Guidance in which option is better-suited to your specific project is available from LOUISIANA TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS, a provider of IT SUPPORT GONZALES, LA.

While there are many ongoing arguments about the capabilities of ASP and PHP relative to one another, both are highly capable languages which can handle most development tasks. The major concern for most shops should be what skills are available in-house and for hire, rather than which technologies may be marginally more effective; even if a particular choice will reduce development and implementation time, this must be balanced against the cost of developers who can make use of that choice. Some employment markets have more developers of one variety than the other, and the particular conditions in your field will vary.

Finally, consider the possibility of using Ruby on Rails or another less-popular technology. Some customers for COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES have had great results working in environments which go against the grain, and focus on options which might not otherwise have been considered. By surveying your existing talent for skills that may relate to your project, you may find not only greater savings, but a tighter alignment with your company’s direction and goals.

In the end, which language should power your website is not so much a question of how capable it is, but what skills your team brings to the table – and which technology platform you’re using.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at GONZALES IT CONSULTANT

Does CPU Speed Still Matter?

COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the Gonzales Louisiana Computer Pro – Does CPU Speed Still Matter?

If you’ve been using computers long enough, you remember when it was very important how fast your CPU clock speed was. Indeed, the early Intel CPUs were graded directly by clock speed, and it was pretty simple to figure out that a bigger number was better.

But while offering COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES, LA, I’ve noticed that a lot of people are confused by the way things work today. What’s better: a 2.8 GHz dual core 64 bit CPU, or a 3.23 GHz quad core 32 bit? The numbers don’t even seem related anymore, and it’s hard to tell which one makes the bigger difference.

In practice, you’ll generally find that your biggest choke point – dictating how fast and well your applications really run – is the amount of memory in the system. A close second is generally the disk bandwidth, rather than anything CPU related, and while the major application of faster CPUs was once higher-quality graphics… most graphics tasks have now been offloaded to a dedicated GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) rather than being managed by the main CPU.

So when performance becomes an issue, the most common need for COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES is a lack of sufficient memory – and, on occasion, a need to upgrade from a 32-bit CPU to a 64-bit variety which can handle larger quantities of memory. For graphics-intensive applications, a new video card makes a much larger difference than a new CPU.

The CPU’s primary task in modern days is not so much the operation of the applications you run, but the management of memory areas. The more limited your memory is, the more work your CPU has to do managing that memory, and when memory contents are “swapped out” to the disk and back again, the processing can’t proceed any faster than the disk can deliver that data back into memory.

There is still a significant group that needs faster clock speeds, even more than they need memory, and that group is involved in scientific computing. When doing arbitrary-precision calculations for chemistry or physics, especially in the biosciences, CPU speed dramatically impacts mathematical performance – but memory doesn’t necessarily create an issue.

But in general, the clock speed of the CPU doesn’t matter as much as it once did… and although a higher number is still better in most cases, the one that matters most of all is the 64-bit designation that allows you to use more memory in the system. While providing IT SUPPORT IN BATON ROUGE, the most common reasons for performance problems have always been available memory and disk bandwidth… even in the days that processor speeds were easy to decipher, and “higher is better” was the only rule you needed to know.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN LOUISIANA. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at GONZALES COMPUTER CONSULTANT

Password Security – COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LOUISIANA Computer Pro

COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LOUISIANA Computer Pro – Password Security

As someone providing COMPUTER SUPPORT GONZALES, LOUISIANA, I commonly find that people are using insecure, easily-guessed passwords. The most frequent explanation is that the password is “easy to remember.”

The trouble, of course, is that passwords which are easy to remember are also easy to guess. But when you institute a series of rules and requirements for secure passwords, what usually happens is that people write the password on a sticky note and hang it on the side of their monitor.

As someone providing COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES LOUISIANA, I am keenly aware that security and convenience are constantly at war with one another. On the one hand, you’d like to have your business 100% secure… and on the other, you’d like things to be as easy as possible in your business. But secure and easy almost never come in the same package, so every business makes constant trades between one and the other.

The ideal password, of course, looks like random noise. Something along the lines of K!h8j^)Qv,$g is near impossible to guess, but also near impossible to remember. Enforcing passwords like this is almost an invitation to write them down somewhere easy to see.

A more realistic sort of password starts from a word people can remember. Using a common word, of course, is easy to guess – and susceptible to what’s called a “dictionary attack” in security circles, where a would-be attacker simply tries every word in the dictionary until one works.

However, one thing I’ve learned providing IT SUPPORT IN GONZALES is that memorable passwords can be a good thing. Combining two words with a number or special character between them is frequently both memorable and reasonably secure. So while “giraffe” would be a bad password – as would “giraffe1” or “1giraffe” – it’s far more secure to use “giraffe42zebra” instead.

For further security, one or more capital letters can be mixed into the password, but they should usually be placed in the middle of the word rather than the beginning. While it may seem more natural to use “Giraffe42Zebra” as your password, security is significantly higher with “girAffe42zebrA” instead – which can easily be remembered as having capital A’s.

When even greater security is desired, adding “special” characters or punctuation to the password can make the password much more difficult to guess. They can be inserted into the middle of the password, essentially at will – e.g. “gir!Affe4*2zeb&rA” – or used to replace letters which look similar, such as “g!rAffe42zebrA” (replacing the I with !). A similar approach can be used with numbers, such as by replacing the letter E with the number 3 to produce “g!rAff342z3brA” and a highly secure password.

Keep in mind that while it may seem tempting to create an office-wide policy of using animal names or some other category of words, that category may not be particularly memorable (or well-known) to all of your employees. Simply providing these basic guidelines and letting them choose whatever words they prefer will accomplish the real goal: secure passwords which are still memorable.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at GONZALES COMPUTER CONSULTANT

COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LA Computer Pro – Custom or Off-The-Shelf?

COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LA Computer Pro – Custom or Off-The-Shelf?

A common question we encounter while providing COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES LOUISIANA is whether to custom-build systems from parts. The basic idea is that if you start from the level of parts, you can design a system which is better suited to the exact things you’re doing, and it’s worth the extra time and effort because you can often get good deals on the parts.

On the other hand, you have to wonder just what all that time and effort is worth. And on some level, you have to think that when you walk into just about any electronics store, they have all these pre-configured and pre-assembled computers that could be up and running in a matter of minutes… instead of waiting several weeks for parts to be delivered, and spending hours putting them all together.

As you might guess, when you’re providing IT SUPPORT IN GONZALES, you get to see both sides of this question. You see the people who are doing everything custom-built, and the people who are buying everything off the rack, and all the points in between. You also get to support both kinds of configurations, and see exactly what the real cost is for both options.

What shouldn’t surprise you, when you think about it, is the reality that you simply can’t get the same deals on parts that the big companies get. If you’re not buying thousands at once, you just can’t demand the lowest possible price on your components. Even when you add in a profit margin for the machine, the end cost is significantly lower than a custom job.

So the next question is, when someone providing COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES needs to work on the machine – whether to upgrade it or to fix something that’s broken or failed – which one really comes in with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO)?

You might think that the custom machine comes in with a better review on this front, but in truth… the preconfigured system wins again. The machines you get off the shelf have usually been constructed with careful attention to things like system airflow, cable ties, and appropriate driver installation. In many cases, the custom system simply doesn’t have the same level of detailing, and the internals of the machine look almost like a bowl of spaghetti.

Another option which shouldn’t be overlooked is the warranty that comes with most off-the-shelf systems. When something goes wrong on a custom box, it’s often hard to know which component has caused it, which company provided it, and who is responsible to provide a replacement – if there’s even a warranty involved. Sometimes, the system doesn’t even have any warranty protection… and that’s why the components appeared to be such a good deal.

As they’ve been saying for decades, when something looks too good to be true… it probably is. It may look like a good deal to build your own machines from parts, but it’s a short-term savings, and you end up paying for it in the long run. Whether it’s finicky drivers, lack of warranty coverage, or just plain inconsistent performance, custom machines are almost always a liability in the end… not an asset.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional IT SUPPORT IN GONZALES LA. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at LOUISIANA COMPUTER CONSULTANT

Video Display Troubleshooting

COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LA Computer Pro – Video Display Troubleshooting

A common problem people have requiring COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES, LOUISIANA is issues with video display. Sometimes, it can be something as simple as having the brightness turned down; other times, it can be a bad controller on the motherboard. Since a video problem often means no work is getting done, use this guide to help you find the problem quickly.

If there is no picture on the monitor, check the brightness and contrast controls on the monitor to ensure they are not turned down. While this may sound very basic, it is actually rather common for a co-worker to do something like this as a prank. In addition, check to ensure that the power cable is properly connected, both to the computer and to the electrical socket. Finally, check the connection to the computer – again, at both ends of the cable – to ensure it is correctly and properly connected.

The final step, if none of these prove to be the issue, is to swap out the monitor – either by connecting it to another available computer, or connecting another monitor to the current computer. If the monitor works on another computer, the problem is clearly with the computer… while if another monitor works on this computer, the problem is clearly with the monitor.

The reality of monitors is that there are few things you can do to fix them without involving the factory. If the monitor is not under warranty, the most a provider of COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES can do is recommend a replacement monitor.

If the problem is clearly with the computer – or no alternate monitor and machine are available – the next step is to consider the video adapter. The easiest way to do so is to power down the computer (disconnecting the power cord completely once it is shut down), then open the computer case and look at where your monitor is plugged in.

If the socket is wired directly to the motherboard, you have an integrated video controller, and there should be a “jumper” – a small black clip connecting two wires – which allows you to disable this controller. Some machines have this setting available via software in the BIOS setup; check the screen when booting the computer to see which key starts the setup program.

Check this setting to ensure the video adapter is enabled; if it is disabled, check the back of the machine to make sure you have the monitor plugged into the right socket. Many computers have both an integrated and an expansion video adapter, and the monitor may simply be plugged into the wrong one.

If the monitor is connected to a card plugged into an expansion slot, take note of which card it is and what type of card it is. Before jumping to the conclusion that it is broken and must be replaced, ensure the card is fully seated in the expansion slot by pushing down firmly and evenly on the top edge. Finally, verify that the onboard adapter – if any – has been disabled, either with the jumper or through the system setup.

This simple series of steps should be enough to repair most problems that do not require an adapter or monitor to be replaced. If in doubt, a provider of IT SUPPORT GONZALES LA will be able to assist you.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at COMPUTER CONSULTING

5 Simple Ways to Combat Spam

COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LA   Computer Pro – 5 Simple Ways to Combat Spam

SPAM! When we talk to any of our clients that we provide COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES, LA, to, nine times out of ten they will insist that their greatest headache is the amount of spam that floods their email boxes on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, if your email address is already on the mailing lists of any major spam offenders out there, getting yourself removed can be near impossible and in the short term, your only real source of relief will be to install a quality spam filter, preferably at the ISP level so that the offending messages are filtered before ever hitting your email server or inbox.

To prevent spreading your email address around even further, or if you’ve been lucky enough not to have your address already placed in the sights of the evil spammers, here’s five simple ways to keep your spam intake at a minimum.

  1. Never make any purchases from an unsolicited email. Even if whatever they’re selling seems to be an attractive and legitimate purchase, you have to consider how they got your email address in the first place. According to ICAN (anti-spam) regulations, the simple fact that they sent you the email without your prior permissions classifies it as spam. And if they spammed you to begin with, by you making a purchase from them, you’re not only confirming that your address is valid, but that you’re also a prime target for future spam offers. In which case you can be sure that your email address will be sold throughout the spammer community as if it were gold!
  2. Never reply, click the unsubscribe link or click any link in a spam email. By replying or clicking the link in the message, you’re only confirming for the spammer that they’ve got a valid, working email address for you. This is valuable information for a spammer. Don’t give it to them.
  3. Disable your preview pane. The utilities in use by spammers track who their messages were sent to, who opened the message and who clicked the links… all information used to help them strengthen the reliability of their list. If your preview pane displays their email message, this will report back to their reporting utility that you opened the email.

Different email applications have different methods of disabling the preview pane. Our clients for our IT SUPPORT IN GONZALES primarily use Outlook, where you’d simply go to View / Reading Pane / Off.

  1. Use the BBC option when emailing multiple recipients. If a spammer were to intercept your email, all of the addresses on your list would be viewable. Protect your friends and colleagues by keeping their addresses hidden from view.
  2. Use a secondary (or third) email address when making web purchases, posting to newsgroup lists or participating in forums. Spammers will collect email addresses from anywhere they can be collected. Keep your primary address for contact only with trusted, personal contacts and use a separate public address, such as a Gmail or Yahoo address for your other web activities.

No one, not even our customers for COMPUTER SUPPORT IN LOUISIANA are safe from the evils of the spamming world. Use some basic strategies to keep your email inbox as clean as possible.

Phillip Singletary is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at Gonzales Computer Consultant

Memory And 64 Bit CPUs.

COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the Gonzales, Louisiana Computer Pro – Memory And 64 Bit CPUs.

One of the more recent developments in the computing industry is the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit CPUs, and – if you’re at all like the average business owner – you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about. It doesn’t really seem like 64-bit CPUs are any faster, or provide any better performance, so what’s the big deal?

Those of us who provide COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES, LOUISIANA have heard this question plenty of times, and the simple answer is just that the 64-bit CPU lets you put more memory in the machine. With 32-bit processors, the machine is limited to no more than 4 GB of system RAM, and some operating systems won’t even use that much – stopping instead at only 3 GB of usable memory.

While this may not seem like a big deal, the reality is that almost all of the performance problems people encounter with their PCs in day to day operations are caused by not having enough memory in the machine. Having more memory can improve performance dramatically, and with the sheer number of applications most people run at once on a modern computer, 4 GB is simply not all that much.

Just a few extra GB of RAM can speed systems tremendously, and reducing the amount of time your employees spend waiting for operations to complete can make a big difference on your bottom line – even if all it saves is five minutes a day, that’s over three hours a month per employee. Recovering this lost productivity can mean thousands in annual savings, even for small offices.

With the price of RAM so low, it’s easy to juice up the performance of your workstations with a few extra gigs of RAM – if you have a 64-bit machine. With a 32-bit machine, it’s not that long before you hit the ceiling, and no more RAM can be placed in the system.

When we’re providing COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES for our customers, we always recommend new workstations have 64-bit processors and use 64-bit versions of the operating system – most 64-bit CPUs can act as a 32-bit system, but you lose most of the benefits from using a 64-bit processor. Using a 32-bit operating system on a 64-bit processor essentially gives up everything you were getting from the 64-bit CPU in the first place.

An important consideration for new workstations, of course, is whether 64-bit operating systems are available – and whether having more than 4 GB of RAM is necessary in the first place. For some tasks, one or two GB of memory are sufficient, and a 64-bit machine is not strictly speaking necessary.

However, when providing IT SUPPORT IN GONZALES, LA we’ve found that having a consistent and reliable configuration for all machines frequently reduces costs overall in the long run… even if the workstations themselves are a bit more expensive at first.

Phillip Singletary is a provider of professional NETWORK SUPPORT IN GONZALES. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at COMPUTER CONSULTING

Wireless Network Security

COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the Gonzales, Louisiana Computer Pro – Wireless Network Security

Whether dealing with an office or a home network, COMPUTER SUPPORT IN Gonzales, LA. frequently involves dealing with a wireless network. These days, the wireless network is more and more predominant, whether for more convenient sharing of internet and LAN access with guests and consultants, or simply to avoid having to run large amounts of cable.

Unfortunately, the default configurations of most wireless routers and access points make it simple for unauthorized users to gain access to your network – whether simply to “piggyback” on your internet connection, or for more nefarious purposes such as corporate espionage. While these activities are against the law, it can be difficult to find and prosecute the intruder… and whenever proprietary and confidential company information are involved, the damage can become impossible to repair.

One of the first things needed for a wireless network is to disable broadcasting. While providing COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES, we find that most small businesses leave broadcasting on because they believe it will impact operations. Broadcasting is not necessary for the wireless network to operate; it simply announces the network identifier to the world, allowing curious individuals to see what networks are in the area – and try to connect to them. Disabling this feature conceals the identifier of your network from the rest of the world.

Once broadcasting is disabled, it’s important to change the system ID (the SSID or ESSID) from the factory defaults. Hackers and spies know that most companies use only a few different kinds of wireless network routers, and will try several of the most common ones just to see if they work. Like passwords, these identifiers can be guessed if they are too related to your own life or work, so use the same care you would use for selecting a password.

While we’re on the subject of passwords, one of the biggest problems in network security is people using passwords that are easy to guess. On wireless routers, the problem is compounded by having a default password that – like the default system ID – is known to most hackers. This password, as well as the administrative username if possible, should be changed to something unique and secure.

Similarly, most wireless hardware sits on a default IP address which is well-known. Some hardware will not allow you to change it, but most will, and it should be changed if this is allowed.

Once you’ve secured the network from these major issues, it’s time to cover the more direct efforts people might make. Encryption – whether WEP or WPA – should always be enabled on your wireless network. At its core, wireless networking is a radio signal, and a properly modified radio receiver can still pick up and display network traffic from the airwaves. WPA is the more capable and reliable of the two, and should be preferred to WEP.

If your wireless network has an integrated firewall (most do), you may want to configure it so that unnecessary or undesired traffic is restricted. Check the manual for your hardware, or contact a provider of IT SUPPORT IN GONZALES to configure your wireless network’s integrated firewall so only approved traffic is allowed.

On the subject of firewalls, as a last line of defense you should always have personal firewall software and anti-virus software installed – and kept up to date – on each computer. With these precautions, your wireless network should be safe from all but the most dedicated and extreme of intruders.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES LA. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at support@latechnologysolutions.com

Why You Should RAID Your Servers

COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LA Computer Pro – Why You Should RAID Your Servers

When setting up a server, pretty much everyone is in agreement: the worst possible thing that could happen is a total hard disk crash, which would lose a great deal of data – at least until a backup were restored.

Providing COMPUTER SUPPORT GONZALES, LOUISIANA gives us many opportunities to see network configurations of all sorts, and there’s one solution to this risk that we simply don’t see often enough: a RAID implementation on the server. Small businesses, while they recognize the value of backups, are frequently slow to see that the time necessary to restore a backup is still a major liability – that if a hard drive crashes, it takes time to buy and install a replacement, and then the backup needs to be restored.

RAID 5 makes recovery from a single hard drive crash simple. Modern RAID setups can even provide hot-swappable replacements, so the server never needs to go down – even for a second – while crashed drives are replaced. While you do lose some hard drive capacity compared to simply installing the drives as provided, the added security more than makes up for it… and disk drives are inexpensive.

Several clients for COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES LA ask how to reduce their risk of downtime, and RAID 5 provides one of the simplest ways to almost eliminate all risk. With RAID 5, a series of three or more hard disks provide the equivalent storage space of two disks… while improving disk performance and preventing drive failure. Any number of disks may be used, and only a single disk’s capacity is lost – assuming all disks are the same size, which is frequently the case and sometimes a requirement.

During use, information is “striped” across the disks, and as each stripe is written, recovery information is written to the disks – so that if any one of the three disks is lost, the data on it remains available (at only slightly slower speeds) and can be restored automatically when the damaged drive is replaced. Hot-swap systems make this an easy process, and allow the IT SUPPORT IN GONZALES LA to replace the drive without so much as a second of overall downtime.

There are, of course, still some risks. If a second drive fails before the first failed disk is rebuilt, data will be lost and need restoration from backup – creating the same need for downtime. An added level of security can be provided with RAID 6, which tolerates the loss of any two drives before rebuild is complete, and requires only one additional disk to provide the same capacity as a RAID 5 system: a minimum of four drives, providing the storage of two fewer drives than the array contains.

When the permanent availability of your data is critical to your business, and even an hour of server downtime is too much, using a RAID system on your servers can make a huge difference in your network’s fault tolerance… and improves data transfer significantly, for better overall network performance.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES LA. If you need IT SUPPORT IN LOUISIANA  for your small business, please contact us at SUPPORT@LATECHNOLOGYSOLUTIONS.COM

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  • The Open Source Dilemma April 8, 2011
    The Open Source Dilemma In recent years, it has become common for many people to tout open source products and technologies for anything and everything in the modern business, and it often sounds too good to be true. While these products and technologies clearly have benefits, are there drawbacks, and how serious are they? Like […]
  • Choosing ASP or PHP for Your Web Site April 5, 2011
    Choosing ASP or PHP for Your Web Site When putting together a corporate web site, one of the biggest decisions in the planning process is which technology to use for it. The two most popular options are ASP and PHP, but choosing one or the other can often be a chore. Providing COMPUTER SUPPORT IN […]
  • Does CPU Speed Still Matter? March 31, 2011
    COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the Gonzales Louisiana Computer Pro – Does CPU Speed Still Matter? If you’ve been using computers long enough, you remember when it was very important how fast your CPU clock speed was. Indeed, the early Intel CPUs were graded directly by clock speed, and it was pretty simple to figure out […]
  • Password Security – COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LOUISIANA Computer Pro March 29, 2011
    COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LOUISIANA Computer Pro – Password Security As someone providing COMPUTER SUPPORT GONZALES, LOUISIANA, I commonly find that people are using insecure, easily-guessed passwords. The most frequent explanation is that the password is “easy to remember.” The trouble, of course, is that passwords which are easy to remember […]
  • COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LA Computer Pro – Custom or Off-The-Shelf? March 25, 2011
    COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LA Computer Pro – Custom or Off-The-Shelf? A common question we encounter while providing COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES LOUISIANA is whether to custom-build systems from parts. The basic idea is that if you start from the level of parts, you can design a system which is better suited to […]