Ronald Pacchiano

I’m the IT manager for a small law firm in New York. While the firm is small, we’ve been around for a long time. As such, the partners are very old school in the sense that they don’t trust technology — so much so, in fact, that for the longest time, we didn’t even have […]

I recently started a new job with a five-state sales territory. I’d like to use my notebook on the road with my wireless connection, rather than the slower dial-up modem. Aside from a couple of hotels and a mall restaurant, I haven’t come across any other locations that offer wireless access. Any idea how I […]

I have a considerable amount of money invested in 802.11b products — multiple PC card adapters, some USB adapters and even a wireless print server. Recently, I purchased a new notebook equipped with an 802.11g wireless adapter. It worked fine on my network, but I figured since I had the “g” adapter already, I might […]

I serve as a one-man IT department for my family business, and I don’t have the time to learn (much less understand) all of the intricacies of networking. In spite of this deficiency, though, I’ve managed to keep everyone connected, working and secured for about 10 years now. Our little five-person office network uses a […]

I’ve been experiencing a lot of problems with my router lately, so I decided that the time had come to replace it. While I perused the store shelves at the local Best Buy and read through the various router specifications, I came across a router that indicated support for WPA2 and WMM. I’m familiar with […]

I recently became the victim of identity theft. One evening, I received an e-mail from eBay (or so I thought) stating that my account would be suspended, possibly permanently terminated, if I didn’t update my account information within 24 hours. Using the link included in the e-mail, I proceeded to the site and updated my […]

If you share a network printer with other people in your office, maintaining the confidentiality of printed documents can be difficult. Consider the following scenario: You’ve just finished compiling a sensitive report, which shouldn’t be seen by anyone outside of your department. Just as you send it to the printer, the phone rings, detaining you […]

Firewalls revisited    It would appear a few people were a bit unhappy with the advice I offered a reader in a recent column entitled “Two Firewalls Too Much of a Good Thing.” Here’s a quick overview: A reader was having a problem trying to share files between multiple computers on a home network. Each PC on […]

It used to be that the only way a small business owner could afford high-quality, full-color marketing or presentation materials was to outsource them to a professional printing service. This not only took a lot of time, but it was also very expensive. Today however, color printer technology has improved to the point where you […]

I recently made the move from an old 56 Kbps dial-up modem to a new high-speed DSL line. Using the Speed Test at DSL Reports, I was able to measure the speed of my DSL line’s upload and download rates. Currently, my download throughput speed averages between 975 Kbps and 1100 Kbps. My upload speed, […]

I recently purchased a new PC for my home-based business and moved my old PC into the kids room. We have only the one printer and the kids need Internet access anyway, so I decided to setup a small network so they can print and surf the Web. It went smoothly except for one small […]

For the past six months, I’ve been using a Linksys BEFW11S4 4-Port Cable/DSL Wireless Router for my home office network and it has been great. Recently, I came across a few additional PCs to play with and I wanted to give them access to the Internet as well. However, I don’t have any more ports […]