I visited a friend last week who owns a small business. His computers are managed by a local consulting firm, but he was beginning to suspect that their advice was less than stunning, and so asked my opinion.

A quick look at the computers showed a few interesting snippets. There weren't any fundamental issues, but it was clear that for all the 'service' they were getting, nobody, either at the business, or the consulting firm, were doing any kind of maintenance on the machines, only fixing them when they went wrong. This was true, even though the company in question charged both a monthly fee (retainer) in addition to an hourly fee went someone was called out.

I visited a friend last week who owns a small business. His computers are managed by a local consulting firm, but he was beginning to suspect that their advice was less than stunning, and so asked my opinion.

A quick look at the computers showed a few interesting snippets. There weren't any fundamental issues, but it was clear that for all the 'service' they were getting, nobody, either at the business, or the consulting firm, were doing any kind of maintenance on the machines, only fixing them when they went wrong. This was true, even though the company in question charged both a monthly fee (retainer) in addition to an hourly fee went someone was called out.

Dual Core is a hot topic at the moment, and from personal experience (my iMac Core Duo, and a MacBook Pro currently on its way) it works very well. It is not so much the power of the CPU as the difference it gives in responsiveness - I don't get any of the freezes or pauses that I used to get when using my iMac Intel Core Duo.

I'm no stranger to multi-CPU systems, my first home PC (as opposed to the work units I'd been provided with) was a dual CPU unit. And of course my Niagara cased T1000 and T2000 units take the multi-core model to the extreme.

With the advent of dual-core, you have to wonder whether there is a difference between dual-core and dual-CPU. Is one faster than the other? Dual-CPU theoretically have more bandwidth available to each CPU, but the dual-core model allows information to be shared more effectively between the two cores because there is less distance between the two cores.

Dual Core is a hot topic at the moment, and from personal experience (my iMac Core Duo, and a MacBook Pro currently on its way) it works very well. It is not so much the power of the CPU as the difference it gives in responsiveness - I don't get any of the freezes or pauses that I used to get when using my iMac Intel Core Duo.

I'm no stranger to multi-CPU systems, my first home PC (as opposed to the work units I'd been provided with) was a dual CPU unit. And of course my Niagara cased T1000 and T2000 units take the multi-core model to the extreme.

With the advent of dual-core, you have to wonder whether there is a difference between dual-core and dual-CPU. Is one faster than the other? Dual-CPU theoretically have more bandwidth available to each CPU, but the dual-core model allows information to be shared more effectively between the two cores because there is less distance between the two cores.

As expected, VMware has decided to make VMware Server free to use. VMware Server is a nice product that has some great methods for creating, managing and deploying virtual machines. It is a great product for consolidation and testing.

At the same time, Microsoft has made VirtualPC free. This is the desktop product rather than the server product, Windows Virtual Server 2005, which is already free.

As expected, VMware has decided to make VMware Server free to use. VMware Server is a nice product that has some great methods for creating, managing and deploying virtual machines. It is a great product for consolidation and testing.

At the same time, Microsoft has made VirtualPC free. This is the desktop product rather than the server product, Windows Virtual Server 2005, which is already free.

The Sun Fire T1000 Server on loan from Sun in the US arrived just a couple of weeks ago, but its taken me a while to find the time to set up the machine and start some testing.

While the T2000 I tested a couple of months ago was a general purpose server, the T1000 is designed more as a computer node, where the primary purpose is to make use of the power of the T1 CPU, rather than to provide storage. That means it supports only two SATA disks, and is therefore in a much smaller package, at 1U high and about 2/3rds the depth of the T2000.

The Sun Fire T1000 Server on loan from Sun in the US arrived just a couple of weeks ago, but its taken me a while to find the time to set up the machine and start some testing.

While the T2000 I tested a couple of months ago was a general purpose server, the T1000 is designed more as a compute node, where the primary purpose is to make use of the power of the T1 CPU, rather than to provide storage. That means it supports only two SATA disks, and is therefore in a much smaller package, at 1U high and about 2/3rds the depth of the T2000.

Finding an alternative method of getting into your data is becoming big business. Google is a perfect example, not only does their search engine provide the information in different ways, but the various extensions they have made to that information (Froogle, Google Local) have turned publicly available, but largely unformatted information into something that has structure and utility.

WinFS, which now now been Dropped from Longhorn was going to offer a different way of accessing and referring to the information you store in files on your computer, and on others. Again, there have been different, and previous attempts at this. Apple's Spotlight provides methods of searching the document, the comments and tags you add to documents and by other metadata attached to files.

Finding an alternative method of getting into your data is becoming big business. Google is a perfect example, not only does their search engine provide the information in different ways, but the various extensions they have made to that information (Froogle, Google Local) have turned publicly available, but largely unformatted information into something that has structure and utility.

WinFS, which now now been Dropped from Longhorn, was going to offer a different way of accessing and referring to the information you store in files on your computer, and on others. Again, there have been different, and previous, attempts at this. Apple's Spotlight provides methods of searching the document, the comments and tags you add to documents and by other metadata attached to files.