Brent - How can we increase the signal strength of our cell phones and wireless cards while using them in our office or home?

Great question. What is the point of having a cell phone or air card if it doesn't work where you most often carry them?

Finally, get a full 5 bars at your office when you install a Wi-Ex zBoost cell zone and signal booster. They come with a bit of a price tag, but never before has there been a product that claims to accomplish this task so well and actually delivers when (and where) it really counts. Head to the Wi-Ex website and read up on the various products they carry. We recommend the zBoost YX510-PCS-CEL; it works with all types of carriers / phones simultaneously except for Nextel for the benefit of your entire office.

If you, like most, find yourself a little skeptical toward such a bold-claim, read this great review by cnet about this established solution to a long-time problem.

For those of you who don't wish to clog up your email servers with huge attachments, there is Sendspace. Without even signing up for a free account, you can use their incredibly simple upload form to attach any file on your computer up to 300MB in size and send it's download link to the person you desire via email. The recipient will promptly receive an ordinary link accompanied by simple instructions to download the file straight from the web to the computer.

"Your online home for easy photo editing, storing and sharing..."

Photoshop.com is the latest creation for the masses by Adobe. It is completely online (no software installs or downloads of any kind!) and provides a wealth of tools to crop, re-size, color-correct and distort any image on your computer. It doesn't stop there, either; signing up for a free account gets your two gigabytes of storage and an interface to share your photos and creations with friends in the form of customizable slide shows and individual images.

In the super-saturated realm of airport and air transportation security laws, there is a new one brought to us by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Spare lithium batteries -- like the ones you would bring to supplement your notebook or digital camera -- are no longer allowed to be checked in with your luggage. Officials have found that loose batteries may have been responsible for a few fires due to the fact that cargo holds do not have the same climate control standards as the passenger areas.

For batteries in most consumer electronics, there is no limit to how many can be carried on. Larger batteries like those used for notebooks are limited to only two per traveler. By now, almost all of us are aware of how seriously airport security is taken by the authorities; for more information regarding this and other DoT regulations, head over to the U.S. Department of Transportation Safe Travel website.

Despite last year's release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, we are still recommending the continued use of Windows XP Pro to our business clients. Many bugs and annoyances were addressed, but there are just too many stability problems and compatibility issues with older software that plague accounting departments and general business work-flow. These, along with some hardware compatibility issues and general instabilities, keep the operating cost of a Windows Vista network higher than we would like to see our clients dealing with. Unfortunately, Vista comes standard on almost all new computers; you will need to specifically ask Dell to "downgrade" you to XP Pro and there is even a small additional price for the option.

Windows XP Pro continues to be valuable to most business situations, so there will be no problem hanging on to it until the release of Windows 7 (the successor to Vista) is released and proves itself. We will be testing the Beta version of Windows 7 this Spring, or whenever Mircosoft decides to release it, and we are hopeful that they will get it right this time.

If you have already purchased Windows Vista or a new computer that came with it and wish to downgrade to Windows XP, take a look at this excellent step-by-step guide to downgrading from Vista to XP.





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