WHAT I USE
Inspired by Paul Thurrott! A lot of information about the hardware and software I use on a daily basis. I test things and switch around more often than most people - I'll try to keep this up to date.
COMPUTERS
OFFICE SERVER
Under my desk is a Dell PowerEdge T300 server running Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, the new streamlined server for small offices. Like Windows Home Server, it backs up all the computers in the house every night. Having a business-level server means login names & passwords work anywhere in the house, and when I want to lock out the kids, I can change their password from the server. Power!
A technical note: the PowerEdge server is actually running Windows Server 2008 r2, with SBS running virtually in Hyper-V.
There is also an Acer Aspire easyStore AH340-U2T1H Home Server with 6Tb of space for backups and all media files - music/photos/movies.
OFFICE COMPUTER
The main workhorse is a Dell Studio XPS 9000, running Windows 7 Professional, with an Intel Core i7-920 processor (8MB L3 Cache 2.66GHz)processor, 8Gb RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 video card. (I replaced the ATI Radeon HD 5770 video card after I discovered it was responsible for a variety of system problems and crashes. I've completely lost faith in ATI video cards. Again.)
The computer is running like lightning after installing an Intel 160Gb solid state drive to run the operating system.
Visual pizazz comes fromtwo Viewsonic 24" widescreen monitors, which I wouldn't give up for anything. Add the surprisingly affordable Logitech G51 surround speakers and it beats the living room for music and movies.
STORAGE
Gigabytes are cheap and easy. External hard drives are almost cheap enough to fill up and put on the shelf for long term storage. I've got a couple of external drives, including a 1Tb Western Digital drive to hold backups, plus the 6Tb WHS.
There's also a Buffalo Terastation for server backups, looking a little underwhelming these days - four hard drives in a RAID 5 array for security, and only 750Gb of storage space, in a box that looks a little like a miniature safe - a round dial on the front and marvelous flashing lights.
NOTEBOOKS
The Samsung Series 9 laptop is a very sexy triumph of design and engineering. It's my new best friend. We also have a couple of ultralight, ultrathin Vostro V13s.
Instead of a plugin card or USB dongle, I got a Verizon MiFi wireless broadband card for connections while I'm out of the house or travelling. The upgraded MiFi handles 4G connections, which is completely meaningless in Sonoma County.
TABLET
The hype is all true about the Apple iPad 2. The chances are you will find yourself using it at home more than your computer, doing things that you didn't expect it to do. Don't overthink it, just get one.
My wife loves her Kindle.
LIVING ROOM COMPUTER
Enthusiasts still believe a computer will be the center of your living room, coordinating all your media needs - video, DVDs, TV recording, photos, music, and more. There are rocket scientists who have been defeated by that project. Be proud if you get a device and you can make something work, but nothing brings the whole package together neatly, not yet.
I've got a Tivo HD for television, and a nearby Dell Inspiron Zino HD displaying J River Media Center's theater view for photos, music, and videos.
The Logitech Harmony 880 remote control is a crucial piece that makes the whole thing work. A Logitech remote control is expensive but essential if you're drowning in remotes. Unfortunately it doesn't talk to a computer, so I had to add a Gyration media center remote.
PERIPHERALS
PRINTERS
Epson's Stylus R300 inkjet printer is still surviving, long after it should have died. Have you noticed how much less printing you're doing? The Epson does good quality photos, but I rarely print anything any more. When my Brother color laser printer died, I didn't bother to replace it.
I don't know what I'll get when I need another printer. Some of the more recent Epson models have not been satisfying - noisy, large, and thirsty for ink. Be careful!
CELL PHONE
My HTC Incredible is a great cellphone, although most of the Android phones and the iPhone are all pretty remarkable. We're not worried about 4G or next generation speeds in Sonoma County - we're not going to see those towers nearby for years.
CAMERA
There's an aging Panasonic DMC-FX55 in a drawer somewhere but I haven't pulled it out in ages. Cell phone photos are good enough.
SCANNER
My aging Epson Perfection 2400 still does a serviceable job of slowly scanning photos and single sheets. There's a range of specialized scanners now - it's still possible to get single sheet flatbed scanners but most people only have the low-end scanner included in their all-in-one device. Midrange scanners with sheet feeders can be agonizingly slow; you have to spend four hundred dollars or more to get little Fujitsu scanners that chew through 25 pages a minute (but typically only 8.5x11 pages, not photos).
HEADPHONES
I have a Plantronics headset plugged into a USB port for Skype calls and dictating to the computer. But the jewels are the Sennheiser HD595 audio headphones that keep me going late at night.
MUSIC
I had to hand off the 80Gb classic iPod to my wife, who brings it back every week or two to fill up with another Audible book. One of my religious convictions is unwavering - I will never install iTunes on my computer! Nasty, invasive software that moves files around without permission and mucks up tags and tries to do everything in Apple's proprietary format. Pooh. Thank goodness for J River Media Center, which syncs the iPod and converts videos to the odd iPod native format and makes me happy every single day.
It's weird. Know what I use for music in the car or on the road? My phone, running Amazon's Cloud Player software. It plays files stored on the phone as well as files in the cloud, and is easier to use (and nicer looking) than Android's built-in player.
When I can get a decent Verizon connection for the phone, I can use J River's Gizmo app for Android, which streams my entire home music library.
ONLINE SERVICES
COMMUNICATION
Comcast charges a lot for "business-class" service, but speeds are really satisfying - 22Mb downstream, 5Mb upstream. Business accounts also do not have any bandwidth cap. Comcast currently enforces a 250Gb monthly cap on residential accounts. On the one hand, that's a lot of bandwidth and more than sufficient for most people. On the other hand, we are all enjoying the videos that stream from Netflix and Hulu, which chew through vast quantities of data on the way to your screen, and I don't want any nasty surprises towards the end of the month when my connection goes dead.
Microsoft Online Services handles bruceb.com mail.
Google Voice runs my phone service for all purposes - incoming and outgoing calls and text messages. The pipes provided by Skype, Comcast, and Verizon are conduits for my Google Voice number to travel through.
Skype offers amazingly good phone call quality over a decent Internet connection. Comcast took over my phone service and all calls are a flat rate anywhere in the US, which reduces the need for a service like Skype, but I'm using it frequently since Google Voice can route my calls to my Skype In number as easily as to my landline and cell phone.
PHOTOS
When I want to share photos, I put them in a Dropbox folder and get a sharable URL.
Windows Live Photo Gallery has built-in support for online photos and galleries, which I've used occasionally. At different times I've looked into Facebook and Flickr and Picasa and some of the other photo sharing sites but simplicity should lead us all to pick one or two services and stick with them.
WEB SITES
bruceb.com is hosted at GoDaddy, which has odd online control panels but makes everything accessible for such a cheap price that it was irresistible. Unfortunately GoDaddy does a terrible job of hosting WordPress sites (overloaded servers and slow performance) so brucebnews.com was moved to BlueHost.
I've got many domains registered with 1and1.com, one of the largest web hosting companies in the world, which has dirt-cheap rates and good online control panels. Support is hit or miss, like most big companies.
The news page is built on WordPress. Microsoft Live Writer works with WordPress, making it much easier to format a news post and add pictures.
I hope Tumblr.com has a business plan to make money - I love its ability to create links quickly to odd things that I discover online. (Here's my Tumblr page.)
FILES
Dropbox syncs files among multiple computers - I use it to have access to client files on desktop and notebook computers, as well as online. It's become my primary resource for storing files online.
At various times I've stored files in SkyDrive, Acrobat.com, Google Docs, Amazon cloud storage, and other smaller players. One of our hard problems will be remembering where our documents are stored - far worse than just remembering what we named a folder.
MORE
LastPass is the indispensable utility for keeping track of passwords and logging me in to password-protected websites on all of my computers. I still have Ilium Software eWalletrunning for other kinds of numbers - credit cards, frequent flyer numbers, and the like.
Xmarks syncs favorites across all the browsers on all of my computers.
Internet newsgroups are still busy but most people are barely aware they exist. Newsleecher software with a monthly Giganews subscription provides access to huge troves of information, media files, and useless noise.
Google Reader is my current choice for reading RSS feeds. It's an online service that can be accessed from any browser. It's increasingly useful as the foundation for apps on mobile devices - Google's Reader app looks good on Android phones, and Flipboard and Mr Readerboth hook into my Google Reader account to display new items on the iPad.
LogMeIn Rescue is the (expensive) service that allows me to provide remote support. It changed my business dramatically. If you're looking for remote access to a home or office computer LogMeIn works like a charm.
GFIMax RemoteManagement runs my patching and monitoring service. Autotask runs the ticketing system that keeps me organized.
SOFTWARE
OFFICE APPLICATIONS
Internet Explorer 9, Chrome 13, and Firefox 5 are all installed. At the moment Chrome is the default, IE9 is the fallback for websites that require it, and Firefox is rarely used.
Microsoft Office 2010 is the basic tool, of course, with Outlook at the heart of everything I do all day. I'm now keeping most of my support notes in OneNote 2010, which reveals new eye-opening tricks all the time.
Quickbooks 2010 and Quicken 2010 are well behaved and mature and useful and quirky and infuriating, just like always. I've got Quicken going online to our banks to download transactions and pay bills. At one time I set up Quickbooks to go online with the bank also and found it slow going - unintuitive setup and a really annoying process to reconcile the bank accounts. Plus I got snarled in a web of bank charges, as if Wells Fargo had never dealt with anyone before using both programs. Now I just sigh and manually create duplicate entries in the Quickbooks check register.
Adobe Acrobat X Professional is essential. I'm going through the same conversion happening in many offices - I'm starting to create PDFs more often than I send jobs to the printer.
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5, purchased with a monthly subscription, runs the web site.
MUSIC & VIDEO
J River Media Center 16 is the essential program for everything related to music and video - organizing files, playing files all over the house, syncing with iPods, converting formats, and everything else. It plays all video formats after installing the CCCP codec pack. (Be careful with codecs! You can muck things up pretty easily.)
I settled on DVDFab to rip DVDs to a variety of formats. It's not the cheapest choice, and there's a lot to be said for AnyDVD and its related products, but I've gotten used to DVDFab and can finally get high quality movie rips.
I was using J River Media Center for movies and DVDs but had to buy Cyberlink PowerDVD to watch Blu-Ray discs. Annoying software. I'm not sure it was worth it.
AirVideo Server runs on my main office computer and streams anything from my video collection to the iPad over the home wireless connection. It converts formats on the fly so movies display correctly on the iPad. That sounds easy, and AirVideo makes it look easy. It's not! It's impressive programming.
SECURITY & BACKUPS
Microsoft Security Essentials is the only security product on my computers.
Backups are handled in several ways.
Windows Server Backup is doing a daily backup of the SBS 2011 server.
The SBS 2011 server does daily backups of the individual computers.
JungleDisk is doing online backups of the data files on my office computer.
SyncToy is run manually once a week or so to make a duplicate copy of the music library and other personal files onto an external hard drive.
PHOTOS
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 is slowly opening up its secrets, after years of struggle. Windows Live Photo Gallery has a comfortingly easy interface and enough tools for virtually every basic photo chore.
MORE
Windows 7 speech recognition is becoming an important tool to get my hands off the keyboard and slow down the inevitable hand, arm and shoulder damage done by too much desk work.
I have a small number of utilities that are used frequently for diagnostics and repairs.
Autoruns.exe from Sysinternals gets brought out as the heavy gun when I need to look for startup programs and services.
Snagit 10 is used constantly for screen shots to use on the news page, or to send to clients to illustrate something.
I've tried a couple of different programs for torrents - currently using uTorrent - but they wind up overwhelming my router and slowing my Internet connection until I power-cycle everything with blinking lights. Easier not to download torrents.
DisplayFusion is the free utility that stretches wallpaper across dual monitors.