laptop

TrueCrypt is your friend

Hello again folks, I hope everyone’s week has been going great! So I wanted to talk about a program that has been around for some time. That program is TrueCrypt, an encryption program that you can use to create encrypted volumes on your hard drive for file storage or to even encrypt the entire system.

In this day and age of mobility, it makes sense to create an encrypted folder on your laptop hard drive or on your USB key. This way if your laptop or USB key gets stolen, your data isn’t compromised. There are many products out there that do this for a price, but why pay when you can get TrueCrypt for free! TrueCrypt is Open Source and it does a great job of providing you with encryption capabilities.

With TrueCrypt you can even create hidden encrypted volumes so people can’t see that you have even encrypted something. With the government having been given sweeping powers to take away your electronic gadgets in the name of “terrorism” you can easily lose company secrets to prying eyes. I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust anybody looking at my company data except my company. There is no need for other people to be looking at this stuff without a court ordered warrant. I believe that we all should have a reasonable right to privacy. Instead we’re all treated like criminals and are guilty until proven innocent these days which is really unfortunate. With TrueCrypt you can fight the good fight and ensure that your company data is secure even if someone tries to steal or confiscate your stuff.

You can download it here.

-RP

Buying a laptop for consulting

So you finally decide it’s time to turn in your old clunker of a computer and buy a shiny new laptop for your IT consulting business. What do you get? Brands aside, what specs do you want on a laptop in the wide world of consulting? How much horsepower do you really need?

Well lucky for you I have gone through tons of laptops in my time consulting and I have come up with a veritable list of must haves for the IT consulting geek! You see in the world of IT consulting, you are constantly on the move and a laptop is your best friend. Gone are the days where you sit in an office and get to work from an all powerful workstation. Sure, I have a nice workstation at home, but I find that I use my laptop the most when going from client site to client site.

Here is my list of must haves in your laptop as a consultant:

• Lots of RAM! - Now with virtualization at the forefront, I would get a minimum of 4 gigs of RAM if not more (make sure your laptop can support more) so you can have lots of virtual machines open on your laptop at the same time
• Multi-core CPU - With the meteoric rise of virtualization, it’s a good idea to have multi-cores so you can turn your laptop into a wonderful test environment without riding your laptop into the ground
• Windows 64 bit (XP/Vista/2008/Windows 7) - A 64 bit version of Windows is essential to use all that RAM. If you limit yourself to a 32 bit version then you aren’t going to be able to use all that RAM to run virtual machines.
• VMware Workstation! - This is my preferred software of choice for creating virtual test environments on my laptop. In my opinion VMware Workstation rules the roost!
• The largest fastest hard drive you can find! - If you have to decide between large and fast, I would lean towards large first. You’re going to need all that space to store your virtual machines. You could instead get the fastest hard drive you can find and then get a small external USB hard drive for extra space too.
• A USB to serial cable! - How are you going to configure all those switches/routers as a consultant without a serial port? Get a good USB to serial cable adapter and use that to connect your laptop to these devices.
• A large USB key! - I carry around a 16GB USB key to transfer large patches and data between machines when needed. Also make sure you encrypt any sensitive data you place on your USB key, there are a lot of free solutions out there. This will save your behind if you lose your USB key
• A portable mini USB powered switch - This will come in extremely handy when you need to connect multiple devices and your laptop to a network and you won’t have to lug around a clunky power adapter in your laptop bag to power the switch.
• A good video card! - Don’t cheap out on your video card, you’ll regret it instantly. In these days of multimedia overload, you can’t go without a good card, make sure you buy a laptop with a good video card with lots of power.
• A CD/DVD burner drive - This almost goes without saying. You’re going to need this to burn countless installation and patch CD/DVDs. It’s part of being a consultant!

-Cheers, RP

Using Windows Server 2008 as a desktop OS

Hi folks, as you know I have been trying out various OS’ as of late on my laptop to see how things work. I used to use Windows XP Professional for the longest time on my laptop but finally got bored of it and wanted a change.

The next thing I tried was Suse Linux but unfortunately it couldn’t do everything I wanted it to do due to the large amount of Microsoft centric programs I needed to run in my daily work. So what I did was dual booted Suse Linux and Vista and that seemed to suffice for quite some time. The downside of this was that Vista wasn’t that much better at running my Windows world apps either. That’s pretty sad in my opinion.

You see I need 64 bit in a Windows world so I can use more memory because I’m an avid user of VMware workstation. When you’re using lots of virtual machines on your laptop you need more RAM. There really is no way around it. Of course using VMware workstation under Vista isn’t the best case scenario. Basically my laptop would become way too sluggish. Not surprising, I really didn’t expect anything less.

So then I switched to Windows 7, and as you saw in my blog, I couldn’t really get too far due to the issues I had. But for what I was able to run I was impressed with it. Frankly, I can’t wait until Windows 7 comes out, I’m looking forward to it and I hope Microsoft gets it right this time.

So what did I do next? I wiped my hard drives clean and I installed my copy of Windows Server 2008 on my laptop. Talk about a huge difference! All my hardware worked perfectly and my laptop performed way better than Windows Vista! Who would have thought that a server OS would make a great desktop OS!?!? Anyways, I disabled all the unneeded features and services and I turned on the “desktop user experience” that is included with Windows Server 2008 to “Vistaify” the OS.

I have to say I have been pretty happy with this, and I think this is what I’m going to stick too as my OS until Windows 7 comes out. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

-RP

My Experience with Windows 7

Hi folks, so I tried out the recent beta of Windows 7 on my laptop having been absolutely fed up with my Vista 64 bit installation. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. My computer ran really slick as compared to the Vista OS. It looks like they ‘ve come a long way to making this OS better.

I didn’t experience any of the constant headaches that I was having with Vista. Things actually seemed to be running smoothly. I currently use Windows Server 2008 64 bit with the desktop experience enabled on my laptop and it runs great. I found that the Windows 7 installation ran quite similarly to Windows Server 2008 if not a little quicker.

I do have some gripes however. I got some really strange errors that seemed to be related to the .NET Framework when trying to install Microsoft Office 2007. I tried using the released .NET sdk and framework for Windows 7 that Microsoft released but it wouldn’t install. Also Windows updates worked for a while and then they completely bombed out. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the Windows updates part of Windows 7 working again. I can forgive these things for the time being because they are still in beta.

I have now wiped Windows 7 from my system and am using Windows Server 2008 as my laptop OS. I will try Windows 7 again on my laptop when the next release comes out.

-RP