7 Barebones Computer Buying Tips

Writen by Peter Stewart

Getting a new computer should be a cool thing, especially a cheap computer. After all that time struggling with you old machine, probably fighting with it to get the latest software to run, your new computer should be a ray of light for your computing future.

Oh, if it were that simple. If things were really that easy or simple when buying a cheap computer, life would be much easier, but just like every other thing, its not that simple.

Barebones computers have become extremely popular, and for good reason. Getting a barebones computer which does not include a monitor and comes with the bear minimum of parts makes them an upgradable, practical and cheap computer.

But not all things are rosy in barebones computer land…

1. Missing parts

Although barebones computers do come with the essential pieces, most people need at least one or two extras for their day to day barebones system. This is simply due to different applications people use them for. Don’t get caught missing that extra part from your barebones system that you then need to get later. You still need to do some homework and research to find out what you really need from your barebones system.

2. Super cheap computer deals

Beware, many corners can be cut to get those sub $200 dollar barebones systems. They can be great, but not always, carefully analyse the components of the package. Also remember that a barebones system couldn’t possibly include a monitor for that price, which adds a lot to the price.

3. Mismatched parts

This could become a problem if building your own computer, but it even happens in pre-assembled barebones computer deals. There is a chance that you get something that doesn’t fit with the barebones system. There are lots of different connections and speed ratings between parts. Make sure the ones you get match up to the other parts and your needs. Although not common, incompatibilities between parts are not unheard of.

4. Outdated components

To get super-cheap deals older parts are sometimes used in cheap computers. Although this can be a great cost-saver and some old parts are fantastic, there is nearly no chance of an upgrade without putting a major amount of money into your barebones computer again, perhaps as much if not probably more than you paid for your great deal.

5. Defective parts

Although this is another one that has gotten better as the competition has gotten stronger, there is a chance of defects in cheaper products. Your motherboard could be faulty, your power supply might give up after a month or two. These may not be intentional problems, but come hand in hand with “cheap computer stuff”.

6.Refurbished computer parts

Refurbished computer parts are a great way to save some money. Not always the biggest saver, but there can be problems with the updates to these computers in much the way as mismatches happen in barebones systems. Often the computer is slightly updated to meet needs, but is really quite an old model, just with upgrades. Can be fine, but the parts they replace might be replaced with something newer but inferior.

7. Claims of great warranty

To try and entice you into feeling safe, offers of long warranties are made. Most of the parts in the computer could have past their warranty dates, so the warranties are purely from the company that put the computer together. They can be hard to contact and take their time to get replacements to you as well as expect you to mail the computer to them so that they can do the repairs.

Barebones computers can be a great way to put together a second computer, build a computer for simple purposes, like writing documents and casual web surfing. Barebones fit perfectly as a second computer. Just keep these things in mind and you won’t get bitten by the bargain bin monster.

IT Specialist – Information Gathering is a Must

Writen by Joshua Feinberg

IT Specialists must reach their intended audience to be successful with their marketing. As you’ll learn in this article, your first step needs to be gathering information about your niche.

IT Specialists Should Study What their Niche Clients Do

For instance, to reach small medical offices, get up to speed on the business issues that impact the decision makers in these small medical offices. Get subscriptions to industry publications, e-mail newsletters, and other industry publications that you know medical office managers are going to read. For instance:

o Medical Economics o Financial Management Strategies o Medical Group Management Association publications

These resources happen to be all U.S.-based, but there are others. The key thing is to start reading the publications so you understand what’s keeping medical office managers up at night, what’s driving their decisions, what their biggest points of pain are, what the biggest security issues are, and what the biggest IT issues are right now so you can become an IT specialist in their field.

Learn What Solutions You Can Give Your Clients

Find out how small medical offices are using technology to change the way they do business, to get reimbursed faster by insurance companies, to make scheduling more efficient, and to keep track of charts more effectively.

Whatever industry it is (architects, graphic artists, veterinarians, etc.), make sure that you understand big picture trends that are going on right now. As an IT specialist, your prospects will expect you to be the expert.

An IT Specialist is a Virtual CIO

Then, when you go in to meet prospects, you’re not just the consulting firm that sells PCs, or installs LANs, or fixes software problems. But you’re a true virtual CIO. You can analyze their special business needs, make recommendations, create long-term planning strategies, put it all together and make it happen on-time and on-budget.

IT Specialists Are Not Commodities

When done right, you’re not just the tech people. As an IT specialist, you understand your prospect’s business. And your prospects know that they are not going to spend six months training your firm because you can hit the ground running. It will be obvious you’ve worked with lots of other offices their size and you’re definitely the right people for the job. Their only questions will be, “So where do I sign?” and “When can you start?”

Spend Time Reading Your Clients’ Trade Publications

Instead of just reading the consumer and IT trade publications to keep up from a techie perspective, make sure that you understand the business issues and specifically the business IT issues that impact the niche that you’re targeting. You won’t become an IT specialist in that industry by paying attention to general-interest publications like PC Magazine or CRN or conferences like COMDEX.

Copyright MMI-MMVI, Small Biz Tech Talk. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance}

Troubles Clustering Windows 2003

Writen by Adam Yax

This article isn’t from Microsoft, it’s from in-the-field technicians that work with clusters in real world situations. At Phoenix Synergy we are contacted regularly to help local businesses (small and large) with any clustering help they may need. In this case the customer had 7 Windows 2003 Dell servers, each with the standard Dual Broadcom NIC that comes with 1-U servers these days. As you know those network interfaces can be “Teamed” to form a single interface. The client wants to make their existing production environment as fault tolerant as possible. These 7 new servers are new and are setup in a lab environment. Each running Windows 2003 standard.

What do we have to work with:

They have two dedicated Domain Controllers for Active Directory, they are running the DNS for these for both internal and external name resolution. Their domains zone records will be hosted here, they will become ns1 and ns2.

They have web two servers, and three complus servers. Later they will implement their SQL Clusters, but we wont get into that here.

So far it’s a straight forward configuration. They want to have the NIC’s teamed, having NIC1 from each server plugged into switch-1, and NIC2 plugged into switch-2. Allowing for a switch to fail. They will have a cross-over cable between the two switches allowing either NIC to fail. Each switch will be plugged into it’s own Firewall/Router, but the Gateway on each server will be set to primarily point to the FW that their switch-1 is plugged into, we add a second Gateway IP with a different metric to allow for any failure of the primary firewall. Each Firewall is plugged into a different ISP and has a different External IP configured. This allows ns2 to be an IP on ISP-2, which allows for a complete failure of the first ISP. By having all the host records on ns2 pointing to IP’s from the second ISP allows for complete failure of an entire segment of their line.

That is the layout. Once we get AD setup and DNS configured, we team and setup the NIC’s. Pull a few plugs to test the theory of the setup and we’re confident everything is doing well. So now we have to setup and test the cluster.

The cluster:

Since we do not have a network load balancer we have to balance the load across the web servers and complus servers by way of Microsoft’s Network Load Balancing. We proceed with the NTLB Management interface to cluster the web servers. Each of the two servers converge into the cluster without a hitch. When we try the same on the complus servers it does not go as well.

The problem:

We add complus1 to the cluster. It adds fine, of course it does it’s the only member of the cluster. It says “converging” for a moment and then goes green. We attempt to add complus2 to the cluster and it says “converging” forever, it never converges. It stays in the state of “converging” for over 30 minutes, refresh after refresh, stopping and starting, pausing, trying anything. We can not get the second node to converge. We try adding complus3 and get the same result. We retrace our steps, checking DNS for internal resolution of both the servers themselves and the cluster IP’s, all looks good. We attempt to ping all nodes, everyone seems to ping each other fine. IPConfig shows the Cluster IP on each of the complus servers. NTLB is bound on each “Team” interface. Searching Microsoft’s support they insist there is a problem with the NIC. So we proceed to unteam and try each NIC individually. As we retrace our steps we find the same problem regardless of how which NIC’s we use on any system. On a whim we uncluster each, reboot, and add complus2 first. Then we add complus3 to the cluster. And they “converge” within seconds. Trying to add complus1 fails. So we have isolated the problem to just one server.

The solution:

It turns out that NTLB was bound on complus1, it was bound to each NIC (both members of the “team”). Once we re-team the NIC’s and remove NTLB from nic1 and nic2, the server converges into the cluster without a problem.

Summary:

When clustering be sure to only select the NTLB service on one of the NIC’s being used as the cluster. No other NIC should have NTLB bound to it. As we continue with our proposed configuration, everything works well. All tests are successful and it looks like they will have a great fault tolerant production environment. Next is the SQL Clusters, implementing two SQL Clusters on an EMC SAN live, with no tolerance for downtime, this should be fun. Until then…

Ultimate Ubuntu Dapper Look Like OSX

Writen by Supriyadi Slamet Widodo

There are so many people try to imitate Mac OSX Tiger’s look with their current operating system for their Linux or Windows. Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 uses Gnome as its desktop environment. Ubuntu Dapper desktop environment offers a wide variety of choices when it comes to cosmetics; you can make it look like practically anything. In its default condition, Ubuntu Dapper is highly usable, but perhaps a little bland. If you’ve always admired the Mac OSX Tiger desktop theme and layout but aren’t ready to drop a load of cash on an Apple machine (or if you want to stick with free software), this article will show you how to make Ubuntu Dapper look and feel more like OSX, with some limitations.

Here are several steps toward to make your Ubuntu Dapper look and feel like Mac OSX:

- Changing themes and icons

- Metacity button position

- Wallpaper

- Desktop icons

- Fonts

- Gnome panel customizing

Changing themes and icons

First, download T-ish for Clearlooks for window theme and control, Humanoid-OSX window border, and OSX Iconset. You need these files to change your default Ubuntu Dapper windows theme and control, window border, and icon set.

http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=30859

http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=35753

http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=31618

After you have downloaded these packages please do these following steps:

- Go to “System -> Preferences -> Theme”. System menu can be found at the left upper corner of your screen.

- Select “Install Theme” and browse to the folder where you just downloaded packages above.

- Select T-ish for Clearlooks package and continue. Now the theme manager installs the theme files so that they can be used.

- Repeat the same actions to the Humanoid-OSX and OSX iconset package.

- Select T-ish from theme list.

- Select Theme Details. Select Tish for Controls, Humanoid-OSX for Windows Border, OSX for Icons and click “Close”. Now you should have a new theme with new icons.

Metacity button position

You can change metacity window button position (minimize,maximize, close) from the right position as Ubuntu Dapper default position to the left position like window of OSX

- Go to “Applications -> System Tools -> Configuration Editor” or using the “run program” action or a terminal, start gconf by typing: “gconf-editor” (without quote) and hitting enter. This program is a bit like the registry editor for windows.

- In the tree on the left you need to go to “/apps/metacity/general/”. There is then a key in the right panel called “button_layout”.

- edit this key so that it reads: “menu:minimize,maximize,close” to “close,minimize,maximize:menu” or “close,maximize,minimize:menu”. Feel free to make your own choice.

Wallpaper

You can change Ubuntu’s wallpaper by clicking right mouse button on your desktop and selecting “Change Desktop Background” from the pop-up menu. Now you should see the background selector. You can add new wallpapers to the list simply by clicking “Add wallpaper” button and browsing to the folder where you keep your wallpaper images. You can go to deviantART to download a lot of wallpapers. http://www.deviantart.com/

Fonts

This guide is how to install and configure Mac Font on Ubuntu Dapper. http://www.supriyadisw.net/2006/04/mac-font-on-dapper-drake

Gnome panel customizing

Gnome panels are those grey things on the top and the bottom of your screen. Panels can contain menus, taskbars, clock, application launchers etc.

Bottom Panel

There are many options to customize your Gnome panel:

1. Native bottom panel.

This panel contains only application launchers and do not need install another application.

- The first step is to remove all the other elements from the panel. In default ubuntu installation there are Recycle bin, Taskbar, desktop switcher and show desktop -button. These are added later to the top panel so don’t worry. You won’t lose them forever! You can remove these elements by clicking right mouse-button on them and selecting “Remove from panel” from pop-up menu.

- Now you have empty gray panel. Next click right mouse-button on the empty panel and select “Properties”. Change the Size of the panel to 50 and remove all the ticks form the selectionboxes.

- Then change to Background tab and select “Solid color”. Change the Color to white, if it’s not already, and move “Style” slider like in this screenshot. Now the panel is ready. Next we just add icons (application launchers) to it. You can simply drag and drop the icons from the desktop. Another way is to click right mouse-button on the panel and select “Add to panel”. Select “Custom application launcher” from the window and fill Name, Command and select some beatiful icon. You can also write a short comment about the program, if you will. For more info about this option please visit Taimila guide. http://www.taimila.com/ubuntuosx.php

2. KXDocker on Ubuntu Dapper

This guide is how to install KXDocker on Ubuntu Dapper. http://www.supriyadisw.net/2006/03/kxdocker-on-dapper-drake

3. Engage on Ubuntu Dapper

This guide is how to install Engage on Ubuntu Dapper. http://www.supriyadisw.net/2006/04/engage-on-dapper-drake

Top panel

You can change your Ubuntu Dapper top panel’s background. To change top panel’s background by clicking right mouse button on your top panel and selecting “Properties” from the pop-up menu. Then select “Background” and choose your background image. You can download my top panel’s background here:

- Top Panel 1024×24 http://www.supriyadisw.net/wp-content/uploads/top_panel_1024×24.png

- Top Panel 1280×24 http://www.supriyadisw.net/wp-content/uploads/top_panel_1280×24.png

Supriyadi Slamet Widodo http://www.supriyadisw.net. For more detail about this guide please visit http://www.supriyadisw.net/2006/09/ultimate-ubuntu-dapper-look-like-osx

How to Manually Update any FireFox Extension XPI File

Writen by David Picella

OpenSource is perhaps one of the greatest things about the web. Using OpenSource programs, however, can sometimes be frustrating because when some programs are updated, others are not. Usually, you will have to either wait for updates of your non-workable programs or delay the updating of other programs to retain functionality. With FireFox extensions, however, you can usually update yourself. Let me tell you how.

1. Download the extension you want to update to your hard drive.

2. Rename the extension from *.xpi to *.zip

3. Open the file with your .zip application.

4. Open “install.rdf” with your favorite text editor.

5. Change the “maxVersion” setting as in the following example.

REPLACE maxVersion=1.0+ WITH maxVersion=1.5.*

6. Replace the “install.rdf” file with the one you just edited.

7. Rename the extension from *.zip to *.xpi

8. Install your updated extension.

Congratulations! You just updated your extension, which in most cases will work with the higher version. It is that easy.

By now, you have figured out (correctly) that an XPI file is just a modified ZIP file. It is not exactly the same, however. You will notice that this does not work if you create an entirely new zip file. You must edit the original one. In addition, you will also notice that the file “install.rdf” is actually an XML file, which also makes sense. Many OpenSource applications put installation settings and other important instructions in XML files.

Without a doubt, the best way to learn about how things work on the web is to jump in and do things yourself. Updating your non-workable FireFox extension is a great example.

Copyright 2006 Majella.us

Computer Desks To Fit Every Room In Your Home

Writen by John Gibb

You might think that computer desks are all the same – but you’d be wrong. There’s a computer desk out there for every room of the house, fitting in with your d