Green Home Computing

The book I read to research this post was Green Home Computing for Dummies by Woody Leonhard et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. I’ll tell you a story I worked at a garage as a trainee motor mechanic in about 1988 & they bought a computer I think in 1985 & used it for stock taking & funnily enough when they were bought out in 2010 they were still using the same computer for stock taking. I dread to think what radiation the computer was producing but to them it made sense. The bosses wife who used it didn’t have to retrain & you could argue that had they upgraded every 2 years like most companies do nowadays think of all the resources that would have been used. That’s the thing with green computing a lot of it’s choice although I’m not suggesting you should use something that belts out loads of radiation, but whether you should use an old item that maybe uses more electric or upgrade to something that has used a load of resources in its manufacture is choice. Nobody can be sure which is less harmful to the environment. You can do things like use the power management features in windows & turn off peripherals when not in use. With the advent of cloud computing we should see less companies & homes upgrading their computers every 2 years which however you look at it is wasteful. Another development is a lot of homes use a home server which might sound wasteful but you can recycle a lot of the components used in it & it centralises your data so you can use older computers as workstations. Even games are going over to cloud computing and eventually an old computer will be able to play the latest games in high definition as the processing will be done at the other end but I think that will be in the reasonably near future.

CCNA

The book I read to research this post was CCNA for Dummies by Silviu Angelescu which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. If like me you have no intention of taking the CCNA exams this book is still a great introduction to cisco networking. CCNA stands for certified cisco network associate & for those interested in taking the exams I’ll write a bit about that. The CCNA is the entry level to cisco certifications. To pass you must acheive 85% & has 3 major components which are internet telephony, wireless networking & storage networks. There’s some questions that are multi choice & have 1 answer, some with more than 1 answer & questions that you have to write a brief answer to. When you pass the exam you are certified for 3 years & then must either retake the exam or take a higher exam like CCDA. CCNA is more general in its syllabus whereas the higher exams focus more on cisco product knowledge. Cisco leads the world in products like routers & switches.

More Networking

A buzzword being passed around the computing world is cloud computing and while how it works is less important than how a network works one thing that should concern businesses is that they are passing the responsibility of looking after their data to another party. They should always have a separate copy of their data offline and really offsite as well. Although storing data isn’t the only function of cloud computing there is things like accounting and word processing that can be done on the cloud but if the connection is down. You do need some kind of back up applications. One thing the cloud does remove is the need for even small computers to have massive amounts of storage and in some cases even the network administrator doesn’t know what they have running. Apparently only 6% of available storage is used. Huge companies that are connected to web services are adding huge amounts of storage to their networks. Microsoft is adding upto 35,000 servers every month. Cloud computing is set to expand and a lot of people think it may be more secure storage with large companies who have bigger budgets than small businesses and can afford the latest technology in terms of fighting cyber crime and at the end of the day if it becomes news that their storage networks are insecure they stand to lose a lot of business.

 

PC Magazines Recommendations

I bought a few pc magazines yesterday so I thought I’d mention some of the things they recommend.

First of all 2 games recommended by pcshopper are gears of war 3 & Driver: San Francisco.

Apparently Photoshop Elements 10 is good according to one of the mags but premiere elements 10 isn’t as polished as it should be instead they recommend sony vegas studio platinum 11.

A digital video camera which caught my eye in the pcpro recommendations is the sony bloggie MHS-TS20 at £122 online.

Among the recommendations in pcadvisor are the western digital my studio book at 3TB and priced at £170 in the external hard drives section and the synology usb station 2 priced at £79 in the NAS department. Note with the synology you add your own storage.

Among the recommendations in the official windows mag is in the mouse department the ms arc touch priced at £33 and the ms wireless mouse 5000 priced at £18.

Finally in stuff magazine which is a gadget mag rather than pc they recommend the iPad 2 wi-fi & the asus eepad transformer in the tablet section. The eepad has a keyboard I think as an extra whichI think is a good idea.