Drew Robb

Focusing on small businesses, Microsoft is making a major foray into the land of backup and disaster recovery, with a plan to make its Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) available to manufacturers in September. According to Ben Matheson, group product manager in Microsoft’s management division, DPM will have an estimated retail price of […]

RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, used to be the province of geeks and high-end IT departments. These days, however, it is finding a growing audience among small businesses as a means of increasing the reliability of critical systems, keeping a database online regardless of failures, preventing data loss, and accelerating information […]

Small businesses looking for affordable notebooks to bring mobility to their workforce would do well to take a long look at Dell‘s new D510 Latitude. The company has put together a lightweight, reliable notebook that can meet the needs of most small businesses. We used the D510 mainly for writing and for Web browsing, but […]

As your business grows, your network needs to grow with it. Many SMBs still rely on a peer-to-peer network — consisting of a few computers cobbled together to share a printer or an Internet connection. But this arrangement is less than efficient because you have to administer each computer individually, and you can’t stretch the […]

Most professional photographers, designers and artists struggle to get their work in front of prospective clients. In the old days, this meant putting together a portfolio and shipping it by courier. In the age of the Internet, it means having a Web presence. For many creative professionals, however, that can mean spending thousands of dollars […]

Still the number one “should-do” on small business owners’ “to-do” list, data backup — or rather the lack of it — remains a challenge (if not a dirty little secret) for most SMBs. Tape-based backups systems — once the go-to option for many SMBs — can be tricky to implement and expensive to maintain and […]

Mobile printing isn’t just convenient, it can add to your bottom line. Imagine you’ve found an interested buyer for a prime piece of property, but you don’t have a printed fact sheet handy, and you’re away from the office. Or perhaps you’re visiting a prospective client and just finished the proposal you are supposed to […]

Remember how expensive flat monitors were two or three years back? Today you can pick up a decent one for not much more than a regular monitor. The same thing has happened with touch screen monitors. Touch screens used to be expensive — affordable for large chains, but certainly out of reach for small businesses. […]

Some small business networks bear a striking resemblance to Rube Goldberg’s wacky drawings. His cartoons depicted elaborate and ridiculous devices to accomplish the most mundane tasks. Just as Goldberg’s work satirized the use of technology to achieve maximum effort and minimal results, many small businesses may be doubling their workloads and tripling their costs by […]

It’s getting easier all the time to find a wireless connection for your computer connection. Drop by your local Starbucks and it’s likely that half the tables have a laptop sitting open on them. Similarly, business travelers have come to expect wireless connections in their hotel rooms and airport lounges. It’s not uncommon now for […]

naRemember how well your computers performed right after you installed them? You could access Web pages rapidly; word documents loaded in moments, and life was good. But after a year or so, things tend to slow down. It’s a fact of life that Windows-based computers tend to gradually lose performance over time. The question is […]

Like most small businesses owners, you probably started off with a couple of PCs. As business grows, you might add a few more PCs and a server as. All of a sudden, you have a simple network on the premises — or maybe not so simple. Although a network offers tremendous benefits in terms of […]