Technology Ti p s & Tr e n d s

ISSUE N1 This Months Tips

Cold Weather Hot Tips p.1 Want to work faster on your computer? With a little practice you can double your speed using Hot Keys

KIDRON LEWIS About the Newsletter

Dear Friends,

WINTER 2009

Jane vs. Jill p.2

Two small businesses, two networks, whos do yours most resemble?

Windows 7 uncovered p.3

An overview of Windows latest Operating System.

A little over a year ago I began work as an independent technology consultant, specializing in smart and cost-eective solutions for small businesses and non-prots. I have decided to build on that experience with the release of this quarterly newsletter, full of helpful tips for all of my loyal friends, clients and associates. Please feel free to forward this newsletter along to your friends and colleagues. To subscribe or unsubscribe to my newsletter, or to share any feedback with me, you can email me at techtips@kidronlewis.com. Below the listing of this issues tipson the left-hand column, I have also included a list of the services I oer to clients in the DC metro area. You can learn more about me and my business at my website www.kidronlewis.com. I hope you will all nd time in your busy schedules this month to sit down, pour yourself a much deserved cup of coee and enjoy this rst issue of tech tips. Happy Holidays,

Goin Rogue p.3

5 unconventional tech tips perfect for the business traveler

My Services
Home and Small Business Audit
Detailed written analysis of current IT infrastructure and network planning

Technical Support
24/7 on-call IT support

Training
On-site training for most PC and Mac programs, including Quickbooks, Excel, Access and HTML

Kidron Lewis

Web and Data Services

Website and email design. Database creation and maintenance, hard drive recovery services

Cold Weather Hot Tips

So just as you begin to think youre getting pretty good with Microsoft Oce, out of the blue Microsoft decides to completely change everything with its 2007 release. For some folks that might be a problem, but not for you - not if you learn a few simple key combinations known as hot keys. Hot keys, a combination of keyboard shortcuts, may seem like a lot of trouble at rst, but with a little practice youll be working at lightning speed - tabbing through documents, webpages and spreadsheets all in one key stroke. Youll no longer need to memorize where each clickable option is on the screen, because you can open, save and edit les much faster with hot keys. (contd on page 4) 1

Networking knowhow

Jane and Jill both run online vintage clothing businesses with approximately the same amount of inventory each. However the similarities end there, as the pair run their businesses quite dierently right down to their IT infrastructure.

Jills network includes a security router with rewall,

which blocks malicious content from the internet before it ever reaches her computers. It also serves as a network switch for all of her interconnected devices, and provides wireless internet access.

Jane has no rewall, only a standard network switch, which

does not scan for any threats before sending them directly to her computers.

Jills network is backed up every night by a secure remote server, and she is notied anytime there is a problem with the back-up.

Janes PCs are each scanned for threats by an out-of-date

antivirus software, slowing down her network even more.

Janes printers are older and were designed to connect to

just one computer. As a result, her IT guy had to connect each printer to a computer on the network rather than connecting the printers to the network itself, resulting in a complex and slow sharing operation.

Jill has two network printers which reliably print, one of

them wirelessly, for when Janes bookkeeper and other associates work off of laptops from her ofce.

Jills high-speed T-1 internet connection allows her to

operate her phone system off of it, saving her 30% on her monthly bill, more than enough to pay for her network upgrades over the course of the next year.

Jane uses an external back-up via USB to back-up all of

the data on her 4 computers. If anything happens to her external hard drive, she will lose years worth of valuable data.

An overview of Windows 7
By Craig Lebowitz

The mention of Windows Vista does not conjure up positive memories for most people. Microsoft made many essential improvements in their agship operating system in the Vista release, but it was plagued with compatibility issues with device drivers that worked in Windows XP. Consequently, many people had a bad experience switching to Vista and it got a terrible reputation industry-wide. ...........................................................................................................................................................

My prediction is that Windows 7 will be the smash success that Microsoft had hoped for Vista.
........................................................................................................................................................... The newest OS from Microsoft, Windows 7, which I have been beta testing for the last 6 months, is a rock-solid improvement on Vista that oers a snappy new user interface and a feeling of speed all around. The drivers are backward compatible, so dont expect any instability there. The speed of the operating system on equivalent hardware is even faster than the venerable Windows XP. The user interface is clean and the default services that run on installation are stripped down by default, making for a good experience on older underpowered machines, and excellent performance on the $400 netbooks that have been the rage this year. (contd on page 4)

Use your Blackberry as an aircard

www.blackberry.com/support
Batteries. Duracell My Pocket Charger $18 Amazon.com

Charge your phone, Blackberry or iPhone with AA

Use your aircard or blackberry as a mobile hotspot/back-up DSL. $150 http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=524 Access your PC securely from anywhere as if you were sitting in front of it. Best of all its free! www.logmein.com Use your GMail account as a back-up hard disk for critical les www. download.cnet.com/GMail-Drive
3

Cold Weather Hot Keys Contd. from page 1

Lets start with Excel. Want to tab between your various sheets in Excel? Just hit [CTRL + PAGE UP] to tab forward - [CTRL + PAGE DOWN] to go backwards. Just made a mistake in Excel and want to x it right away? Hit [CTRL +Z] to undo, and [CTRL +S] to save your document. What about all those open programs you are always drowning in on your computer screen? Shue right through them by hitting [ALT + TAB] to shue forward, and [ALT+SHIFT+TAB] to go backwards. For a complete list of Windows and Macintosh hot keys, go to

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts

An overview of Windows 7 from page 3

By Craig Lebowitz

For new laptop purchases, I strongly recommend a netbook / Windows 7 pairing (look at the Samsung NC-10 and the Dell Mini 9). Do not be fooled by the price: these are powerful and capable computers. My experience with a Samsung NC-10 netbook and Windows 7 has been nothing but positive. All commonly used applications, including Oce 2007 and even the heavyweight Visual Studio run without a hitch. The searching capabilities have been beefed up and I nd using the search for les has become more natural than traversing folder hierarchies. Media Center has been bundled with Windows 7 and the codecs required to encode and decode most video formats are included in the default installation, which takes about 30 minutes. There are migration tools available to make it easy to move your Windows Vista settings to Windows 7. The OS is very stable and has proven itself for my uses both in the oce and at home. You can download the release candidate of the Windows 7 operating system from all the popular bittorrent sites (e.g http://www.mininova.org). Check the reputation (and CRC hash if youre a true geek) of the torrent to make sure you are getting something authentic. The release candidate build will continue to work and receive updates from Microsoft until June 2010. My prediction is that Windows 7 will be the smash success that Microsoft had hoped for Vista.
(Craig Lebowitz is a Senior Developer at NGP Software in Washington, DC)

Technology Tips and Trends - Winter 2009 By Kidron Lewis Washington, DC 202.361.0758 www.kidronlewis.com techtips@kidronlewis.com
4