I find the different types of people in this world of ours entirely fascinating.

When I was younger, there was a popular TV series called “Watching” and the basic storyline revolved around a shy boy and his brash on / off girlfriend. A major theme was people watching and it clarified something I have always enjoyed doing. That of trying to categorise folks just by observing them.

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In data recovery 101 I made the statement “Don’t Panic” when referring to data recovery.

Tonight I had the opportunity to get my son to put that into practice. For those unaware, my eldest is at University studying for a Comp Sci degree and it leaves me with a warm feeling that he asked me first rather than his CS mates or professors.

But I digress.

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This is the second post in what I see as being a long running series on Windows 7 tips and hints and ones that I hope prove useful to you or your users.

• One of the beauties of XP was that you could do a “clean install” using upgrade media. This wasn’t meant as a means to cirumvent paying full price but to deal with the need to occasionally wipe clean and do a fresh install of XP. Well now that facility is also available for Windows 7. However, rather than repeat the article I’ll simply point you at Paul Thurrot’s fabulous site. (more…)

I wanted to flag this up for myself more than anythig.

However – pop on over to Enterprise Networking Planet for a great article on securing your network – quickly. Some of these I’ve already talked about before (see link), whilst others even I had forgotten.

Anyway, enjoy.

There is an incredible amount of free software on the internet and unfortunately a fair bit of it is likely to cause more problems than they purport to fix. So I was thinking what I could write about when up popped my weekly reminder to run a particular scan … and so here I present my top 5 free security tools.

I present them in no particular order but hope they prove useful.

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I’ve been asked a couple of times, if we had the money, what would be the five things I’d do to improve the performance of our network.

Each time, the asker is left almost speechless at my instant response. I don’t know why they think I need to consider these as they are always at the back of my mind. So, today I share my list with you – you’ll note I’ve added in a sixth which I personally don’t often think about because of the size of the network I’m usually dealing with.

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I recently posted this post on another blog I occasionally write for. My thinking was that it is a bigger read blog than mine and as I’m not into blogging for gaining fame or similar I had no qualms with that. That said, that blog does seem to respond slower than mine and after seeing recent stats that showed it jumped 59 ranking places in a week, I thought let’s stick it here as well and see what happens.

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I’m taking no credit for this – I was allowing myself to be sucked in by a public wave search and it literally felt like I was drowning – but I discovered this wave in the process.

If you haven’t tried viewing the live public wave feed then I dare you.

Anyway, the info below is the stuff I keep referring back to so thought where better to stick it than on one of the blogs I write on.

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As a person that makes a living being a network techy there’s something I often wonder.

How many folks actually undertake any form of network maintenance? And by network I am meaning the bits of kit that allow your computer to talk to another for whatever reason. A quick google search would seem to imply that most folks think network maintenance to be checking on your PC’s, printers and servers.

I don’t, and here’s a list of some of the things I think you should do or have in place.

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