Riverbank It management

My Dell mini 10 netbook has arrived and with it my paper-free future, perhaps. First impressions are great. It runs the latest Windows 7 operating system and has 120GB of disk space. The ten inch screen is bright and easy to read, the keyboard is an ok size and it should run for ages on its battery. And most important of all it received the "cool" accolade from my children. All that for around £250 plus VAT.

I'll report back on how it works out in practice and what others think of it. If you are a Riverbank client and you'd like to borrow it just let me know (e-mail me at malcolm@riverbank.co.uk).

Apple’s iPad reaches the UK later this month, having already sold a million units in its first month the US. It is certainly revolutionary, an inflated iPhone crossed with a laptop computer, but is it any good?  Some are calling it a game-changer whilst to others it’s more of a computer without its most vital component, the keyboard.

It’s a game-changer because it takes the best aspects of the iPhone and moves them up to the computer market. It’s lovely to operate and undoubtedly great to use. If you want to view a landscape photograph just turn the iPad round to landscape, if you want to edit a document in portrait view just rotate the iPad again. Now you can’t do that with a normal computer.

The weakness of the iPad is apparent if you want to enter lots of information – it doesn’t have a keyboard. The world hasn’t yet invented the successor to the Victorian typewriter keyboard and although the iPad does have a virtual keyboard on the screen it isn’t going to suit touch-typists.

One of the magic formulae for business is to grow your sales without growing your costs. One contributor to this magic can be IT. If you make better use of what you already have you will get more done in less time, making you more effective and your business more successful. See if any of these practical tips could work for you.

Improve teamwork

The Oxford and Cambridge boat race is an event that rams home the beauty of perfect team work. Business teams operate at a different level but the same rule applies; a well-coordinated team is gong to do better than a shambles of eight people all rowing at random.

A new standard for wireless networking (802.11n) was ratified last week. It's not exactly new because manufacturers have for some time been producing equipment using the draft standard. But it does mean it's now official.

If you have a wireless network that's more than a year old or so, you could get a higher speed connection and greater range by upgrading to the new standard. If you would like to check, contact Chris Jones at Riverbank.

Have you suffered that sinking feeling when you accidentally deleted a file on your network, or clicked Save when you meant to click Save As?  If Riverbank is managing your network, you should be able to recover lost files using a feature called Previous Versions.

With Previous Versions you can:
1. Recover a file or folder that was accidentally deleted. Recover it to its original location or open a previous version and copy it to another location.

2. Recover from accidentally overwriting a file. Just recover the previous version of the file.

We have found an easy and low-cost solution to a major problem caused by finger trouble – accidentally dragging and dropping folders.

It’s a regular issue on the Riverbank helpdesk, when large quantities of data suddenly disappear. “Help, all my client folders have disappeared!”, is the sort of call we get. After half an hour’s searching we discover that they have been accidentally dumped somewhere in the middle of your admin files.

 As part of the upgrade of the entire UK telephone system (the 21^st Century Network, or 21CN), BT and other telecoms suppliers are upgrading Internet connection equipment in telephone exchanges. As these upgrades occur, connections should operate at a higher speed of "up to" 20Mb.

When this will happen depends on when your exchange is being upgraded. It might have happened already (eg Oxford) or it might not happen until 2011 (eg Swindon).

What the higher speed service will cost depends on your Internet service provider. Some are making no charge, and others are charging a small upgrade fee.

The rumours were true. It's now official, Google is working on an operating system to rival Microsoft Windows. It's not at all clear quite what the product will be or when it will be available, but it is safe to assume that it will be bad news for Microsoft and good news for the rest of us.

Competition in this market has been sadly lacking since the demise of CP/M and DR DOS about twenty years ago. So the injection of serious rivalry from Google can only result in faster, more secure computers that are nicer to use.

If you use an Outlook calendar here are some suggestions that might make life just a tiny bit better. Note that some of these ideas assume you are connected to a network with Microsoft Exchange.

1. Create a shared calendar.
If you work with others, create a shared calendar so you can see what everyone is doing, make appointments, set meetings etc.