First, let me start by clearly pointing out that no matter how much data you have, you always should have a backup. No matter what that backup is, online or offline.

What is an offline backup? An offline backup is any kind of backup where your data is stored on removable media such as a memory stick, CD-ROM disk, DVD disk, or external hard drive. Years ago, the primary storage device for offline backups were tapes. Tapes are no longer a viable solution for a lot of backups because they lack the storage capacity and are more expensive per gigabyte than other forms of storage.

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Start here, you need to have a twitter account

Have a Twitter Strategy: from the inbound marketing pros at pr2020

Tweetdeck, Great program for accessing and using twitter from a Windows PC

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When comparing the specifications of computers these days, I get so confused over what the different CPUs offer. It was SO much easier in the early 90′s when you had to compare a 386 to a 486. Now, You have Intel and AMD CPUs to compare along with a string of numbers and letters which really don’t tell you how one computer (CPU) stacks up to another.

Passmark and their website cpubenchmark.net have presented benchmarking information about processors to take some of the mystery out of comparing systems.

You should take this information with a grain of salt, since their benchmarks may not be apples-to-apples comparisons (different systems are running different software which may effect performance data). However, it will give you a basis for comparison when shopping around. For example:

Dell recently started offering a line of PowerEdge servers with AMD CPUs (the PowerEdge 2970) to their server lineup. I set out to compare the PE 2950III with the PE2970 with similar configurations and came up with the following:

Both systems have: Dual CPUs, 4GB of RAM, PERC Raid Controller, 3x 73gb SAS 15K RPM Hard Drives, Dell RAC, single power supply, No operating system, 3 year 4hr 24×7 Support

The Dell PowerEdge 2950 III priced with [Dual] Quad Core Intel Xeon E5410 2.33GHz CPUs is $3,745. According to cpubenchmark.net, this configuration scored a 7285 CPU mark.

The Dell PowerEdge 2970 priced with [Dual] Quad Core AMD Opteron 2347HE 1.9GHz CPUs is $3,874 According to cpubenchmark.net, this configuration scored a 4465 CPU mark.

If you believe these scores, the 2950 is not only the better value, but also outperforms the AMD system by a mile.

As I said, you should take these results with a grain of salt. If you hover over the results graph, it will tell you how many “samples” this configuration has received. The Opteron CPU had only 1 sample whereas the Intel had 9.

This means that the score for the Intel configuration was averaged over 9 samples (tests) whereas the Opteron had only one sample. Further illustrating the point, my desktop computer has an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 CPU which had 84 samples and scored a 2259 on the CPU Benchmark site. However, when I downloaded and ran the test on my computer, my CPU scored a 2878.

So while the data provided on the site is useful for a quick comparison, individual results WILL vary.

Hopefully, this will help take some of the guesswork out of your next computer purchase.

Looking for an easy way to connect with readers on your website? I was – then I found Google Talk: Chatback.

Do you have a blog, online profile, or some other personal web page? Would you like to communicate more with your visitors? Today we’re launching a new Google Talk feature that lets visitors to your web site chat with you. We call it “chatback” because instead of you doing all the talking on your blog, your visitors can talk back to you. Sure, they could leave comments, but those are public and hard to use for a real conversation. With chatback, it’s a real instant message session.

To use chatback, you must have a Google Talk account … but your visitors don’t have to! They don’t even need to have an email address, or to have ever used instant messaging.

This solution works for me because I am the only person at my company that a website visitor would need to chat with. This may not work if you have a “team” of people who you want your visitors to connect with.

Of course, being a free tool, bells and whistles are eliminated – such as gathering (even the most basic)information about the chatter. But its benefit lies within its simplicity.

If you want to try this out for yourself – visit my personal website and start a chat with me!

Enjoy!

This afternoon I was able to successfully upgrade my Lenovo ThinkPad T60 to Windows 7 Beta (build 7000).

The upgrade took forever (about 2 hours). This was contrary to my experience installing a clean copy of Windows 7 on a virtual machine.

My ThinkPad T60 is my production laptop. I use it about 30% of the time during any given week – mostly at when I am away from the office.

So far, all of my applications that I had installed previously are working. All of the drivers I had installed previously are also working (no red X’s in device manager).

I decided to do an in-place upgrade to save me the trouble of downloading and installing drivers. I may try a clean install in the coming weeks if I feel that my system is acting up because of the upgrade.

For the record – I never recommend doing an in place upgrade of an OS – clean installs are the way to go. But I am making an exception here simply because things like driver compatibility with a beta is sketchy at best. If there were published Windows 7 drivers – I would have gone directly to a clean install.

As I have more time to play with this I’ll keep you updated.