Aaron Weiss

You can never have enough closet space, but hard drive space is rapidly becoming abundant. What’s more, you rarely need to even crack open your computer anymore to add space, thanks to the plethora of plug-and-play external hard disks. The NASPerform drive from Other World Computing. External hard disks usually come in two primary flavors […]

There was a time when multi-function Xerox printers and photocopiers were solely the domain of big-budget corporate companies. But with today’s low pricing, even the smallest and home-based businesses can now afford to scan, copy and fax Xerox-style. The company’s latest entry to the SOHO market is the Phaser 3200MFP, a black-and-white laser printer/copier/scanner/fax packed […]

Once upon a time, a 40-megabyte hard drive was the size of a cinder block and cost nearly $1,000. That’s “megabyte” with an “m.” Of course, we’ve become accustomed to multi-gigabyte storage capacity for years. But it wasn’t so long ago that the thought of a terabyte – over 1,000 gigabytes – conveyed a sense […]

Telephone and e-mail systems play a critical role in keeping small business owners connected with customers. But cell phones, landlines, VoIP, e-mail, fax and IM create disparate communications tracks to manage, resulting in an inefficiency of abundance. In an effort to consolidate these incoming and outgoing channels, the term “Unified Communications” has arisen to describe […]

When it comes to competition between operating systems, a platform is ultimately only as useful as its applications. For businesses that use Linux servers for their back-end operations – a category now growing by double-digits quarterly according to IDC – availability of applications is often the most significant bottleneck. As a result, some organizations find […]

For more than a decade, open source software has been mostly the province of programmers. Although the underpinnings of the Internet itself are powered mostly by open source software, it’s been said that most open source projects begin when a coder “scratches an itch.” That is, most open source projects are begun to satisfy personal […]

A word problem: suppose you are riding in a car going 70 mph and your destination is 300 miles away – how fast can you download a 1 megabyte file? Chances are, you can’t, unless you subscribe to a mobile data service. It has long been possible to dribble sluggish bits of data by tethering […]

High-tech products often seem to suffer from a frustrating case of under achievement. Vendors usually aim to differentiate their offerings from competitors’ by only one or two key features, often leaving us with equipment that could do so much more if only it were designed to. To its credit, Oki Data must have hired an […]

Like BMW with its automotive Mini, Google thought outside the box when it introduced an engine of a completely different stripe. Packaged in a slim, rack-mountable chassis, this one lets you search for data within your own organization. And like that other Mini, Google has attracted devoted followers – particularly, small businesses that yearn for […]

You may not know this, but upgrading the near-legendary Linksys WRT54G series routers with free, often open-source firmware is one of the best bargains going. Replacement firmware typically offers a plethora of advanced router and firewall features rarely found on sub-$100 hardware. Make a note of the pool of addresses the router uses when assigning […]

When you need to serve and share files throughout a small business, solutions fall roughly into three primary “grades.” A business with only a couple of PCs might get by simply using the built-in file sharing features included with Windows (and the Mac). One major limitation of PC-based file sharing, though, is that file availability […]

We’ve all heard the news stories — a portable computer is stolen from a government agency or a business and the thieves have access to sensitive data about thousands if not millions of people. It happened to the Veterans Administration. It happened to Starbucks. A stolen computer is one thing — private information is another […]