Maybe you haven’t had the chance to see the latest anti-piracy campaign launched about a month ago. If you haven’t I’ve posted it below so you can get a big whiff of this one. (It’s 4 minutes long)

Despite the ridiculous way it’s presented (I know some of you stopped it the second it started), the message is clear: piracy is illegal and a very dangerous situation you can get yourself into. Don’t think that just because you’re either one person, or one small company that you won’t get caught. I’m not trying to scare you. Just be aware.   More importantly be aware of really bad public service announcements.

Just to give a brief explanation, beta testing is simply the testing portion of development. This is the time when the design of your program, product, service is going to be put through stresses, tests and refinement. Usually if enough time was put into design, then beta testing should not last too long.

The ITRBlog is currently beta testing our services with Windows 7 so when you, our wonderful clients who love to be on the cutting edge of everything technological, wish to upgrade it will be the most painless process you have experienced. Unfortunately majority of what is happening during our beta test won’t be made public, but be assured that it’s the most important step any company can do before implementing an idea.

Let’s get right past the marketing and publicity and propaganda, shall we? Windows 7 is completely awesome and it’s one step closer to perfection in this user’s opinion.

One of the benefits of working for an IT company is the ability to try out new software before it hits the shelves. This also gives me the ability to let you know exactly how it functions in day-to-day usage. For the purposes of this “review” I’ll list the specifications of my computer (hereby referred to as a rig):

• AMD 7750 Black Dual Core Processor (2.7GHz)
• 4GB RAM (3.25 usable)
• 1TB Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive
• GeForce EVGA 9800GT 512MB
• 1 DVD Drive
• 1 DVD-RW Drive
• Home Network

Does Win7 live up to the hype? It most assuredly does. But let’s start at the beginning: On October 22^nd of this year Microsoft will release Windows 7 to the public. It will come in 4 packages: Starter, Home, Professional, Ultimate. The Enterprise package is reserved for special clients but it doesn’t apply here anyway as it’s mainly for a server environment with multiple users.

Starter is a taste of everything you could get if you weren’t cheap. It disables the ability to personalize much of anything and the networking ability is limited to signing onto the internet – no sharing allowed! Unfortunately I had the chance to test this thing out and it left me wanting more. Where were all the pretty graphics I saw in the posters and videos? Not in the Starter version, sorry. But maybe you have a change of heart or decide to sell your PS3 and have a few bucks to spend on upgrading to Home edition. Do you have to go out and buy a whole new upgrade package? Nope. Microsoft found an easier way by adding in the Upgrade Center. Essentially every disc of Windows 7, regardless of which edition, has everything but most of it is locked away until the appropriate key is entered. With the Upgrade Center, all you do is click the version you wish to upgrade to, pay the fee, enter the new key, and the features are unlocked after a quick reboot. Simple! You don’t even have to leave your desk.

Okay, so I got wise and upgraded to Ultimate. To keep this pretty short, the personalization is perfect, but the shining star is the taskbar which no longer groups your open windows, but stacks them in neat squares. Aero Peek allows you to view (in real-time, not snapshots) the open windows in a particular group of windows. The quick launch bar has been replaced with the ability to pin programs and files to the taskbar itself allowing for incredibly quick access to common programs. My pinned programs are Firefox, Outlook, Word and my Folders. I guess you know what I do most of my day. Stock wallpapers are very picturesque and make you feel as if you’re looking through a calendar your insurance salesman handed you last week, but what if you’re not the scenery type? No problem. If you have a picture album that you just can’t stop looking at you can create your own wallpaper slideshow of one album. You can even customize the speed at which the pictures change from every 5 minutes to once an hour. New sound schemes peacefully alert you to warnings and don’t startle like they did since Windows 95, but still allows for any sound byte to be used for the personalization many adore about Windows. Text is very crisp all around and personalization is even allowed in that for the many different monitor types. If text looks blurry, run the wizard and sharpen it up, or vice versa.

Now as for performance, Windows 7 becomes a bit sluggish if you don’t have a fast enough hard drive. My hard drive rated a pitiful 5.5 on the Windows scale while everything else had 6.8 and above. But even with a slower hard drive, programs open up very quickly with every little wait time after you click-to-open. Boot-up time was at a very speedy 34 seconds, down from the usual 55 seconds or more it sometimes took. Shutting down was very efficient and instead of just closing programs without asking me or freezing them to close then out later, it won’t shut down until you tell it to save the file, close the program or just reboot the freakin’ machine. Since my machine is a custom-built rig I’ve always had to reload the drivers for the chipset, Ethernet and other objects of importance – I’m glad to say that the second Windows 7 booted up for the first time, I did not have to worry about that. The only thing I had to worry about was installing video codec packs. The usual video codec package that came with the install of Windows 7 was pretty weak. Playing music was no problem. Windows Media Player has bumped up its functionality as well, though it doesn’t look any better. In fact, it doesn’t look like anything. They reduced it to just the play button, fast forward, fast rewind and stop. I’m sure you can make it look more full, but why? It works the way it is without any intervention. Accessing folders and files is very quick as long as you’re not accessing another hard drive, of which I have 2. I would believe this to be fixed in a service pack or maybe it was designed that way to save power. My bet is on the latter, which brings me into my next point.

Networking; I’m on a home network currently and like to share the files I obtain with the rest of my family. Also it helps when I have to repair my dad’s computer after he clicks on the wrong link and gets a virus. In Windows XP it was always a battle with restarting and hoping that the other machine would just magically grant you permission to get into their machine. Windows 7 simplified the ability to network and a restart wasn’t even necessary to access files. Once you’re added, it finds the other machines attached and adds them to your “group” which is a fancy way of customizing your network. Yes, customization within your network. It’s a simple way of applying permissions to certain files or folders but it works incredibly well. I want my dad to have access to my music, but not my videos – easy, and vice versa for my sister. Security on the network is also very intuitive and easy to navigate. Let me just say that I have trouble with Vista, but with Windows 7 I barely experienced any strain at all.

 There are plenty of other points I could name and so far I haven’t found much to bash in this latest release. So what’s my view on Windows 7? I think Microsoft is clearly one step closer to the perfection they meant to achieve with Vista, and 7 should be as widely accepted as XP was, if not more so. Feel free to post your comments about what you think about Windows 7, I’m always anxious to hear what others have to say.

So here at the ITR pris-…office, we have been slowly trying to get a handle on certain improvements we’ve needed to make based off past, current and planned performance. As always the first thought is of our customers. Not only do we want to make handling your needs easier on our part but a lot simpler on your part. So we’ve come up with a few additions we’d like to add to our current website http://itrtechnologies.com.

• The first major decision was to revamp the entire website from look to functionality and content. I won’t say too much about this part, but suffice to say you will not be disappointed.
• Full biographies of your current ITR Technicians including your lovable blog admin
• Easier access to the fantastic blog
• Newsletter signup so you get an online version of our monthly newsletter (developed by our very own Elizabeth Taylor) before everybody else
• A full description of all of our Managed Services packages
• Easy sign-in for remote access to computers under your account
• Ability to submit a ticket quickly without having to call into the Help Desk
• A fully functional way to make secure online-payments to us and receive an immediate receipt
• A demo presentation of our CEO and Founder Mark Taylor presenting Managed Services via video. Why schedule him to come out to you with cake and orange juice when you can watch a short clip of it online? Ah, the comforts of the internet

Of course those are just a few of the updates coming to you. I’m not going to put my foot in my mouth yet and update you as it comes along, but be aware – change is coming, and it will be awesome.

As I’ve stated on this blog numerous times before, our goal is to inform and educate you. I don’t want to go over your head, but some people don’t understand computers very much. Their basic understanding is that it’s a machine that’s frustrating and does not work when you want it to. If they did, then people like me wouldn’t have a job, nor would Microsoft have so many programmers, debuggers and beta testers under their employ. So I will start at the very basics of computers.

A computer is different from what it was centuries ago. Centuries ago? Yes. The word ‘computer’ actually just means a person or device which carries out computations or calculations. And essentially that is a computer’s basic functions. All a computer does is read numbers. Of course right now you’re reading letters, not numbers. And your browser is a window made of color and shades, not numbers.

Sorry. All of that is, at it’s very basic feature, a jumble of precise numbers being fed through a processor and translated by other numbers into visual mediums. I will skip the basic history of computers and just go right to it and what you want to know: what makes a computer function?

A computer, by today’s standards, requires 5 components:

Motherboard – The motherboard (or logic board on Macs) is what brings everything together. It’s a basic circuit board with capacitors, resistors, all those fancy things that electricians get to know real well. It’s basic function is to transmit data along certain paths. Think of a motherboard as the tracks a train follows.

CPU – Central Processing Unit. If we stay with the train analogy, the CPU would be the train station. All information is passed through the CPU. Nowadays CPUs are coming in a core-format, meaning that it will be one processing unit, but divided up into separate cores to multitask better and easier without most of the strain and heat normally associated with intensive-programs like AutoCAD or QuickBooks. So far technology is up to a quad-core but an Octo-core is not far off.

RAM – Random Access Memory. RAM is volatile memory. Volatile memory requires a surge of power in order to retain information. This is why occasionally, a reboot fixes most problems. If a file is corrupt in the RAM, then a reboot clears the RAM and the problem is gone. (For a bit more on RAM please refer to the Tech-Tip Tuesday on RAM)

Hard Drive – A hard drive is nonvolatile memory. This does not require a power surge to retain information. Presently hard drives use a layer of discs, called platters, to magnetically retain information such as Operating Systems, files and folders and such, but recently Solid State Drives have come into play which have no moving parts and are more resilient to bumps and shakes. The largest consumer hard drive in existence right now is a 2 Terabyte drive.

VIDEO – Video is pretty self explanatory. You can’t use a computer if you can’t see what you’re computing. There’s a whole range of video cards for computers but they all operate the same. A video card contains a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) which takes care of processing all graphical content which needs to be processed. Not much more to it than that.

I hope this article gave a bit of ground information so you can actually understand what I’m talking about in the future. I know this will be somewhat simple to other readers, but the ITRBlog has to cater to everyone. Thanks for reading and keep up to date with us.

External Hard Drive

The external hard drive backup method is probably the most popular only because it’s something physical and the easiest way to backup. There’s no guessing in what was backed up, no extra steps you have to take to ensure a proper backup. Want to know if your copy of Alice Cooper’s Fistful of Alice will forever be protected so you can always hear those sultry tones? Open the drive and the folder and see for yourself. The advantage of having an external as your backup is you can do everything if you want. You can manually move the files you deem most important, folders you added or changed, music you like. Or you can use a program like Norton Ghost to make a ghost of your current hard drive. If anything happens you have a complete copy to go back to almost immediately. The disadvantage (without using a program) is that you have to do everything. Nothing is automatic unless you have a program do it for you. Also to have a proper and effective backup you would require two backup drives, because you just never know what kind of faults one drive may have.

Online Storage/Backup

I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials about Mozy, the Online Backup Company – guy is sitting in the grass, leaves his laptop for a moment and BAM! a meteor hits his laptop.  It’s funny, sure, but effective in portraying how unexpected a hard drive crash, virus or worm infection or just some act of God can be. The idea of an online backup system is what we call in ‘the biz’ Disaster Recovery. What Disaster Recovery means is that in the case of a disaster that (heaven forbid) destroys your business or home, computer or backup drive is destroyed you have the same files in a secure offsite location. This is a good option for people in flood-, fire-, mudslide-, tornado-, hurricane-, blizzard-, EMP-, nuclear fallout-, biblical plague- ridden areas. The disadvantage of this is a monthly fee and the necessity of a high-speed broadband connection. So essentially you’re investing a lot of money into this option, but it works. Also it’s not possible for an Online Backup to be used to keep a ghost copy of your computer, so recovering and being back up and running after a disaster is more time-costly.

 Now of course there are several possibilities and these are the top 2 at the present moment. I will explain in a future blog about other solutions which may work for larger companies and networks (NAS & SAN are 2 examples).

Don’t forget to check in tomorrow for Tech-Tip-Tuesday.

But, ITRBlog, why should I become a fan of ITR on Facebook? you may be asking yourself. Well, for the 500th person who becomes a fan of ITR on Facebook, we will give them a $100 American Express gift card. And since AMEX is accepted mostly everywhere, think of the possibilities: you could buy all those blu-ray movies you’ve been wanting, purchase your nephew the Xbox 360 game he’s been hounding you for, take the family out to dinner, take me out to dinner. Possibilities are endless — for becoming the 500th fan.

Now fortunately, I know a bit more about facebook and can tell you a little bit about it, unlike Twitter (though I can explain that some more later on).

Facebook originally was a site for students to network with each other. You had to be in attendance of a school in order to join. They wouldn’t verify it, it’s just how it worked. Well, it grew into a more prominent view outside of the educational-circles and was being used as a networking tool once they allowed free-reign on membership. Several people use their Facebook page to display their company, or as their resume.

What kind of things can you do with Facebook? Well, it allows you to interact with friends over a long distance as you would with any other social networking site. The ability to give short status updates that people can comment on is quite a big feature; you can give gifts to friends, find friends you lost touch with, other students you went to school with and so forth. It’s a very friendly website and doesn’t have as much (next to nil) negative publicity about it, unlike other sites that try to do the same thing.

So click the link, become a fan and start getting social with us here at ITR.

This past weekend we had the first ITR Company Picnic at Mark and Elizabeth’s house. It was a really great time for everybody who attended. (I know the bios aren’t completed just yet so you don’t really know everybody as well as you should, but trust me, they will be up in the coming days).

I was the first to arrive, though I was 15 minutes late. Mark and Elizabeth had already heated up the grill, put out the chips and dip, brownies, veggie platters, and sodas for all to enjoy by the time I got there. Their sons Jack (soon to be 3 years old) and Henry (who started crawling a week before the picnic) were in attendance. We sat and chatted a while until Mike finally showed up with his troupe: wife, Deb, and his 2 sons and 2 daughters. It wasn’t long until Fabio showed up with his newborn baby girl, wife and mother-in-law. All wonderful people, I assure you.

And now that I think of it, it seems I’m was the only person who didn’t have a family. Haha. But, oh well. All were accepted (family or not) and fun was had. Mark had grilled up some hamburgers and hotdogs in the scorching heat, and the kids played in the pool for the duration of the picnic.

Mark and us other employees talked about work a bit, where the company is heading, the state of it right now — not to mention the economy and how it appears to be improving. Melissa brought over a friend and I was the ONLY adult that swam in the pool. I guess the others were afraid of drowning.

So all in all, for 5 hours we all had some fun getting to know each other outside of work, learning of each other’s travels (Mike was in the Navy, so he’s seen the world twice), and each other’s joys (Fabio and his beautiful newborn girl). It really brings a company together to feel more like a family.

A family that lives an hour and 15 minutes away from me, but with ITR the BBQ’s never too far away.

Don’t think I forgot about giving you that double dose. The next blog is coming up real soon.