160 GB Rugged All-Terrain USB 2.0 Hard Drive from LaCie
Width 3.5 in
Depth 5.7 in
Height 1 in
Weight 8.8 oz
I have been pushing this hard drive on all my clients. It is great for backup purposes, especially if you are accident prone and tend to drop things. Buy two or three of these and have them start rotating in and out of your backup cycle.
Its a scanner with a small imprint that duplexes (double sided scanning) at 18 pages per minute. I used to recommend the Visioneer Documate Series which actually had a faster scan time. What makes the ScanSnap so good is that it scans directly into Adobe Acrobat unlike the Documate which goes into paperport and then allows you to save the document as a pdf. When you scan your documents in the ScanSnap, it will open them up in Adobe for you to review. Anyone who uses Timematters or Worldox can appreciate how this helps create a paperless office, because most document and practice management programs hook directly into Adobe. What is even better is that the ScanSnap comes with Adobe Standard which would cost you an additional $299.00 if you were to purchase it new . The scanner also comes with ScanSnap Organizer which OCRs the pdfs so they are text searchable. You always want to make your documents text searchable, so they are easier to find. If you have not been using OCR, wait to my post in a couple of days about ABBYY Recognition Server. The ScanSnap also comes with ABBYY FineReader which allows you to scan directly into Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. The S500 is out right now and you can get of for 479.99 from CDW. I know they have a version that can be powered directly by two usb cables which makes this scanner ideal for road warriors. You can scan under 200 dpi which is required for some e-filing. We hope to get one soon to start doing demos with it.
There is a problem if you are running Outlook 2007 and are using DualHard2Go to add two monitors to your laptop. Outlook 2007 will open copies of Word 2007 all over your screen and you can't close them. Matrox has come out with an updated driver to fix this problem and you can download it here.
I have finally achieved my goal of having 3 monitors. In an article by the New York Times, they site a study that claims that adding an extra monitor increases your productivity by 20-30%. I have not seen any studies about 3 monitors, but I knew it would be a big help for me.
The big problem I have is that I use a laptop for my main computer at home and at the office. Therefore I cannot just add another video card for my third monitor. Using Google, I was able to find Matrox DualHead2Go, a device that allows you to plug in 2 monitors and treat them as one. It is perfect for laptop users that want to go to 3 monitors.
If money is not an option, and are purchasing a new server, we recommend that you buy 5 hard drives. The first two would be the software partition (The C: drive), and would be configured in a Raid 1 configuration. Raid 1 means that the two hard drives would be mirrored. The other 3 hard drives would be setup in a Raid 5 configuration, which means the data would be stripped along all the hard drives.
A setup like this means that even if one of your hard drives fails,you would still be up and running.
A couple of lawyers have been asking me about digital cameras, some for personal use, some for the firm. Abes of Maine is the cheapest, best place, to buy cameras on the internet.
I was reinstalling windows on a brand new Dell Workstation this weekend. I put the Windows CD in the machine and hit f12 to boot from the CD. The installer went through all the motions and then warned me that it could not find a hard drive. After much hair pulling, I finally figured it out. With SATA drives, you need to go into BIOS and then to SATA Operations. Change it to Combination. Then, Windows will see the Hard drive when doing the reinstall.
