Beth Cohen

I have been running a consulting practice specializing in IT infrastructure for smaller companies for over 20 years, so I’ve seen my fair share of horror stories when it comes to supporting obsolete software. For example, business has been very good for one of my clients. As a result, the business needed to expand — […]

In the interest of saving money, a client recently had me review their computer assets — or to put that in English, I poked around in their stockroom looking for idle equipment that could be recycled. The hazardous waste pile of Pentium 90s, HP LaserWriter IIs, Wyse terminals, and other antiques from the dawn of […]

Terrific, you just landed a new client. They have asked you to review their products in your computer lab. What computer lab? Panic time! With the potential for lots of new business, you need to purchase three computers and a router quickly or you will not meet the first deadline. Your current IT infrastructure is […]

Your office is full of 386’s and 486’s running DOS 3.1 applications. WordPerfect 5.2 was a great word processing application in its day, but you are tired of your client’s complaints about not being able to read your deliverables. Boot-up takes more time than your first morning cup of coffee. You know you are overdue […]

Are your legacy IT systems making your business vulnerable? One of my client companies recently paid $50,000 for a 20-year-old Data General computer because they have a homegrown business critical software application that runs exclusively on the DG hardware. When the old hardware died, they were forced to replace it at great expense. The person […]

Does any of this sound familiar? It has been one of those days; you booted up your computer as usual this morning and instead of giving a cheery beep your hard drive just started to make ominous whining noises and the screen remained stubbornly blank. It looks like you just lost your system disk. When […]

A small non-profit, one of my newer clients contacted me recently. They had just upgraded a computer operating system and they needed to install some virus protection software … and by the way could I look at that pesky DSL connectivity problem while I was at it? Their DSL connectivity was inexplicably cutting off at […]

Last month my trusty private e-mail address that I had used for many years stopped working with no explanation. Without warning the provider had gone out of business leaving thousands of disgruntled customers. Fortunately I already had several alternate addresses ready so I called up my key clients and sent an email update to my […]

As has been widely published in the technology press, Microsoft has announced it will terminate support for Windows NT by 2005, forcing all the small- and mid-sized businesses currently running Windows NT to upgrade and convert or risk business disruption from running obsolete systems. Unlike with previous Microsoft conversions, though, moving to Windows 2003 and […]

There’s never enough time, money or resources to fix all your computer security problems, but that doesn’t mean you should just give up and open your company to the world. Fortunately, there are things you can do that will prevent 90 percent of your security problems without costing you loads of money or resources. Let’s […]

The hottest trend in IT today, outsourcing, has recently become more prevalent in the realm of network services. “Outsourcing my DNS management has been great,” says Andrew Loyer of LoyerTCG, a boutique website development firm. “UltraDNS [a managed domain name service] provides us with a specialized DNS service for our network. They monitor each A […]

By Beth Cohen I recently consulted with a company that had a mission critical financial and project management application that had thousands of network hits a day. The company had been supporting the system in their so-called data center — OK it was more like a data closet, well really just a closet. At least […]