I have an army of D531/D810/D820/D830 at work. They've all been solid for the most part. The D810s are starting to age and are being retired. The only issue with the 531s is overheating, a good 25% of mine have had the fans replaced due to failure. They're in good locations, sitting on desks with no clutter but they still fail. The others haven't had that problem. Don't get me started on the 300+ NX9010 I inherited. Talking about steaming piles....

*looks at my Motorola phones* Yeah, that. It would be nice if I could plug my phone into my PC to recharge instead of having to use their proprietary charger. I have one Moto at work that has it's own adapter for the AC and DC; the same phone, a generation newer, uses different ones. Annoying.

I did a 1:56 500m the other day...thought I was going to toss my dinner from the night before. I've never sweat so much in my life as since I got my C2. Good stuff. Back to the cycling, I used to ride to work when the ride was flat (I live in the mountains). Now that I have to ride down a long hill to the valley (sort of fun when it's dry and not too foggy) then up a steep hill (lots of people push) it's impossible to get there w/o sweating. Going slow is an option but the uphill still causes me to sweat.

Yes if you're one of the people who is up to date on everything that they have installed. If you're not one of these then the reminder is handy. I'd rather have FF say "hey, check for updates on ____" vs having each individual application bug me.

Our computer usage policy forbids this. As a user of a work owned laptop I understand that they purchased it for me to do work on, which I do 99% of the time. During lunch I'll do other things but nothing that is income generating. I also understand that the company's network resources are for company related documents only and shouldn't be used for personal items. I keep a "personal" folder on my laptop that has some pictures, my resume and a few other files in it, nothing more and that is encrypted and backed up to an online storage service. As the IT guy I know that a few people have signed the usage policy and have decided to ignore it. I routinely scan the network for pictures, music and video. Music was an issue for a while, I had a user who thought it was ok to backup her itunes folder there. Same one also backed up her 2.8gb of wedding pictures and a video of her wedding. Others use their work based email for the same thing. It's well known - and documented - that if I have to restore a PC or do a data recovery anything that isn't work related will be skipped. This happened once and it seemed to drive the point home. I also don't do any work on my home PC that is work related.

For small business? Sure. We even considered Gmail for work as it was cheaper than Exchange. Myself I use google docs heavily. Some of my data for work I keep on gdocs so I can get to it from home. Right now I have a spreadsheet open that contains some info on a project I'm working on. That is handy. Getting users to change is the tough thing. We recently moved to Exchange/Outlook and I still have people who are trying to use the old email client despite their accounts no longer being valid.

This reminds me of our desktop management application rollout at work. 1000 PCs were to get it but after 2 years only 25 have it. Yes, the software IS available for everyone but only 25 use it. This successful implementation received press by the vendor despite some of us telling that that it's really not complete. That's ok, the INTENTION is there and little else. Not sure about other /. readers but I'd be very leery to use GA for any of my people.

In inherited a similar setup. Moved most of everything to VMWare. Some of the stuff made no sense. Our PBX has a serial interface. Rather than keep a laptop in the server room to use for management he setup a brand new desktop over in the corner dedicated to managing the PBX. The entire software needed to manage it is maybe 1.5mb....yet it sat on a Dell Opti 745 with 2gb of memory, etc. In the last 6 months they had 2 phone changes....all that box did. I put a win xp image up on vm ware, the phone admins can connect in when needed to use it.

Lojack is an option. Or just encrypt the entire disk with something like TrueCrypt or GuardianEdge. Those two won't delete the data but they'll make it really difficult to get to it. One of my offices had 4 laptops stolen a few years ago. They showed up at a pawn shop....as is, nothing had changed on them. The person who stole it needed money for their meth habit, that was it. Myself, if I lifted a laptop I'd wipe the drive and reinstall my OS of choice if I was going to keep it.

I spent 2 years working a shift like that except I was only 1h away from work. Still, it was pretty rough. Here's what I did. 1) Spend your breaks at work doing something active. I'm not a smoker but I took "smoke breaks" and left the NOC and did laps around the building. I also picked up a book on stretching and did those too to break things up. Pushups were a time killer too and made a difference. Google "hotel room workout" for tips on working out with a minimal amount of equipment. You can store a yoga mat under your desk and an exercise ball makes a nice chair. 2) Changed my eating habits. I went on South Beach. Cut out all sodas and fast food. Started eating 6 meals per day. More protein and veggies, few carbs. I'd pack a cooler full of stuff and take it with me so I could eat on time - especially if I was driving. 3) Moved closer to work. There was a cost to this....I had to give up a month's rent. Ended up 20 minutes away, a 20 minute drive that was nice. The time I saved made a huge difference. After 2 years I left the job. Turnover was really high and after 2 years I saw 2 rotations of the staff. Kita's ideas are similar to mine...good stuff there.

We have 5 different people, all of which do things 5 different ways. On one end of the scale you have folks who address issues as they are brought to light, on the other end of the scale you have folks who work to resolve issues before them come to light. What's worked for me is looking over my trouble tickets to see if there is a pattern. Users having issues with an application? Ok, let's look at that further. Is it due to a troublesome application or lack of user training/understanding? If it's a troublesome app I look at getting the problem resolved. If it's something that I can duplicate I go to the vendor with it and ask them to resolve it w/o my having to purchase an upgrade if possible. Training has always been an issue, our hiring process says that users need to have an understanding of Windows XP and Office 2003 along with basic internet/email skills. It's right there, plain and simple. Often this part is ignored - they'll ask the user if they can use Windows/Office/etc and they always say yes. I end up kicking that back to HR asking them to define use - hell, my kid was moving the mouse around and randomly typing on the keyboard when she was 2. For many of our apps I've written basic training documentation, that seems to help. I also try to be proactive in regards to security. I check our AV logs daily and whenever a new patch is released for a product we use I throw it on the test box to see how it plays with what we were running. If it passes I'll apply it - not too hard to do. Write a patchlink script or just deploy it ASAP. Some of my workers wait until out monthly security report is due then they scramble to get caught up. I've also worked to close a lot of security holes. Email is one - let's see....no reason for users to email .bat, .exe, etc...so I block them. Mailing lists are locked down to members only, everything else has to be approved. Earlier this year a greeting card link that contained Trojan.Vundo hit the mail system. I saw the first one come through from an outside source, which it blocked. I then wrote a filter to reject the content of it. None of my 300+ users received it. The others? Many people ended up clicking on the link and ended up with downtime, a couple of places were so infected that we dropped their network connection until they cleaned up. The folks above me have different metrics. My boss has a motto - "due diligence". When Vundo started taking over machines we had a conference call and had to report in. When I had to share my experience I said "what trojan? I blocked that thing at 5am, it's been quiet out here". Bad move....I was scolded for not doing my due diligence. He'd rather have us step in and work all night to clean up a mess than to prevent the mess in the first place. Yeah, show me how that works. While you guys were working 18 hour days cleaning up the mess I worked an 8 hour day then went out to a nice quiet dinner.

It's been a buzzword for a while and an overused one. Now I'm seeing ads for eco friendly and green realtors - their signs are green and tan and most of the houses they flip are painted the same scheme. The building we have at work is being marketed as green yet there is nothing green about it except for the muted earth colors it's painted. Sorry, but slapping a coat of paint on a 90yo building that has little to no insulation left is a joke at best.

I do this also. I don't mind buying a new game if it's something that I'm going to get a lot of use out of, like Twilight Princess or the Mario series (Kart, Universe). For games that are iffy or are primarily for the kids I'll buy used. Zelda? We got a lot of use out of that one. The Harry Potter one my daughter wanted? Bought it used, she'll probably play it for another few weeks then we'll sell it. GS has given me some options I did have before. Local pawn shop has some games but there is no return even if it's defective. I can walk into GS and see a ton of options, something I can't do at our local big box stores. Plus I can impulse buy and not wait a week for an ebay auction.