We thank you for visiting our website. On the right you’ll find links about our business - our specialties, our rates, our portfolios. You’ll also find a great deal of information about our business - news, stories, articles, help - which we hope you’ll find helpful. If you have any questions or need more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
We have had some recent questions about Microsoft Outlook Exchange servers. This is what we told one client:
Dear Mr so-and-so,
Original available here.
Your data is important. While we work magic in many ways, recovering data from failed hard drives is difficult, at best, and often impossible. The only way to protect your data & minimize downtime is to ensure you have a good backup solution in place. We’ve discussed this before, but it’s so important we want to discuss it again.
We have found the best way to backup data is to use an external hard drive, preferably a network hard drive. Network drives are inexpensive, easy to configure, reliable & fast. We recommend them in all cases - Macs, PCs, even Servers.
While most network drives are identical, we recommend those made by Buffalo. They offer many excellent features & are very compatible. They come in a variety of sizes (250gb, 320gb, 500gb, 750gb, 1tb, 2tb, 4tb) to accommodate for all different kinds of storage needs. They also provide an excellent means to share files among multiple users in a household or small business. These devices can also be configured to backup to each other - for maximum data protection.
On the Mac side of things, we highly recommend using Leopard’s (10.5) Time Machine. It’s an excellent program (thanks, Apple!) that makes automatic backups on a regular basis. It can even be used over a wireless connection. Though many of you are probably still running 10.4 or 10.3, have you considered upgrading?
On the PC side of things, we highly recommend using a backup program called Cobian. It’s freely downloadable from snapfiles.com. It offers great flexibility - allowing you to choose what you want backed up, and when.
If you’re really concerned about safeguarding your data, look at an online backup service like mozypro.com or mac.com.
We’ve had a lot of complaints from clients who have received attachments from users with Microsoft Office 2007 and have been unable to open them. It turns out that Microsoft changed the default file format in Office 2007 & that format is not compatible with any other version of Microsoft Office (both on a PC and a Mac). This is typically Microsoft - introduce something new that offers no advantages whatsoever & provide zero backwards compatibility within their own software families. Nice work, Microsoft!
Microsoft also learns from their mistakes (though they never admit it) & has released converters for both PCs and Macs to allow these new file formats (based on eXtensible Markup Language - suffix docx) to be opened properly. They’re available here:
A client just asked us about the Pioneer PDP4280 Plasma TV - 42″. We recently installed a Pioneer PDP5010FD - 50″, the quality of which was absolutely phenomenal, so we weren’t reluctant to encourage them to go for it. But then we looked at the specs for the PDP4280 & were a bit surprised. This was our response:
A public school teacher was arrested this morning at John F.Kennedy International Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule and a calculator. Read the rest of this entry »
There are a couple of choices in high-speed internet service providers in the Northern Berkshire. There are a few differences in the services that are offered by Time Warner Cable and Verizon:
Verizon DSL offers two services - a basic, 768 kbps service that is perfectly suited to loading websites, retrieving email, and downloading small files such as antivirus software updates. This service will perform these jobs at such a speed that there is no advantage to having the higher speed connection. The one limitation of the 768 kbps service is transferring large files via email or web browser, or watching streaming media, such as audio or video.
Verizon’s other service, their 3000 kbps service, is more comparable to Time Warner Cable’s service, which typically runs at between 2000 and 5000 kbps. These two services are virtually identical, streaming media, transferring files, etc. at lightning fast speeds. Their prices are not. Verizon’s service tends to cost approximately $15 to $30 less than Time Warner Cable service.
We hope this assists our clients in deciding which High-Speed Internet Service Provider is best for you and your needs. Please contact us if you have any questions or would like a Brainspiral technician to install one of these services for you.
For those of you running Windows XP Service Pack 2, you have likely come across this problem at least once. You download a picture, document, or program you need, and before you can do anything, up pops a window, warning you of the (so-called) dangers of opening the file. “Warning,” the window advises, “This file is from an unknown publisher. Opening this file may damage your computer.” As helpful as this proposes to be, it is annoying for those downloading pictures of their vacation or their co-worker’s business document. For those continually annoyed by this, we offer this fix.
To remove these pop-up notifications, go to “Start”, right click on “My Computer”, click “Properties”, go to the “Advanced” tab, and select “Environmental Variables”. In User Variables, click “new”, and add the following: SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS, and give it the value 1. This will disable the pop-up security checks.
We are happy to announce the launch of our new design site, Brainspiral Designs. This site features a full portfolio of our web and print work, and more information on our design services.