Intel DZ68BC Motherboard

Did you know that the Z68 Chipset handles multiple hard drives in a quite innovative way?  You can actually use a SSD [Solid State Drive] for caching your platter drives where you have games, programs, and data installed.  What that means is faster access, and less downtime for you.  Its called Intel Smart Response Technology, and depending on the size of your Operating System drive/RAID, a SSD can cache files for your OS and other programs.  Some food for thought if you are shopping around for an extreme LGA 1155 Intel Motherboard.

Untangle your Network

"Own your network, or someone else will."

A great one line saying that will always have you considering the question, "What and who is going on my network?"  A Linux based multi-functioning firewall software consolidates many network woes and worries.  

It's cheap. How cheap?  Try free.  Obviously, there are premium advantages that are offered but the bare bones of Untangle software is free.  It has minimum requirements for hardware, opening up possibilities for cheap hardware.  The flexiblility of Untangle lies in the "Apps" that you can add at anytime on your setup, depending on what your network requires.  Heres what you get with 3 different options from Untangle:

Premium Package

The Untangle Premium package is an excellent value for customers who want the most robust web filtering, spam blocking and virus blocking bundled with bandwidth management. The Premium Package includes all available products and services from Untangle in a simple-to-install package. Enjoy advanced management capabilities, network optimization, detailed user & policy management and reporting.

Standard Package

The Untangle Standard Package is a perfect entry point for customers who primarily want a robust web content filter in an easy-to-administer package. The Untangle Standard Package delivers best-of-breed web content filtering, multiple layers of security for the best protection, detailed user & policy management and reporting.

Lite Package

The Untangle Lite package offers a collection of free, open-source software applications to run on the Untangle gateway. It provides an entry-level multi-functional firewall and an easy path to upgrade to a more complete package.

For the holidays

Need a gift, and not sure what to get?  Well we have a few items from Lenovo that may be an excellent choice.

The Lenovo Laptops are available and for a limited time for Christmas.  Get this laptop for $450 w/ Office 2010!  Stop into the store and check them out for yourself.  A perfect gift for students!

If laptops are not your thing, come and touch the Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet.

Packed with preinstalled applications to improve productivity in business or school, this Android based tablet offers a lot of punch you can feel.  For $499 this tablet is the perfect tool to integrate in your business or personal life.

What's right for you?

A Solid Upgrade

With more reliability on having your computer "hold" all of your important documents, data, pictures, and videos; Solid State Drives are more of a demand in today's computers.  But everything is going on the "cloud" now right so what is the big deal?  Well, do you really trust having everything on your cloud/web based account?  Personally, I still have vital information stored locally on my hard drive, but if you are a fan of the cloud setup,  cloud services usually have a annual premium fee for keeping your files.

So why SSD [Solid State Drives], and why would I spend significantly more money for a lower amount of hard drive space compared to typical mechanical hard drives?  I know, I know, it doesn't make sense to pay $200+ for 120GB SSD when you can buy 1TB 7200RPM at $80.  It will make sense once you understand the technology behind it.  SSD, no matter what type, or model will always do significantly better than any mechanical drive.

Any time you load a program, play a game, or move/import data you are accessing your hard drive.  Your typical platter mechanical drives have a speed of 60-150MB/s depending what size the drive is [laptop size=2.5", desktop size=3.5"].  When the disk needs to read or write a certain track, there is a hesitation that happens.  That doesn't sound to bad though, however, think about Windows and how many thousand blocks of data it needs to access and read.  The file sizes for this data ends up only being in the megabytes, so you don't need anything huge to handle these reads and writes.  So the more sensible question is:  Why have a huge hard drive as a system drive?

SSD have no mechanical/moving parts, eliminating vibration and movement disk error factors.  They are much more robust since they hold data on NAND flash memory chips.  Because of the memory chips working together side by side, you can have access speeds from 200-500MB/s.  SSD are 10-20 times faster than your typical hard drive. So if your concern is speed while running applications, and reliability on a drive, SSD is an excellent choice for a computer.  If you need to store large quantities of data, a mechanical drive should be setup as a secondary drive within the machine.  Even when doing that I would still have either a RAID setup or an external backup just in case that 7200RPM hard drive decides to just stop spinning.