This article first appeared on InfoWorld, and was written by Galen Gruman.

A new survey shows business use is a major reason that employees are getting iPads -- it's not just for videos and surfing

Corporate IT, consider yourself warned: You'll be dealing with the iPad in your enterprise, whether or not you want to. And it won't just be the iPad; tablets and slates of all sorts are on their way in as well, as Android, WebOS, and Windows Compact Embedded 7 devices begin shipping in 2011. That's one of the findings from a survey of 1,100 enterprise employees polled by mobile management vendor iPass in a report released today.

According to survey results, 16.3 percent of mobile employees already have an iPad or tablet PC device, and another 33.2 percent planned to purchase or receive one in the next six months. A surprising 59.8 percent of those planned to use it for significant amounts of work, while 30.8 percent said they would use it for mostly personal reasons but also for some work. (It's a good thing that the forthcoming iOS 4 for iPad offers corporate-level security capabilities that third-party management tools can tap into.) A surprisingly small percentage said the iPad would go toward personal use only.

[ Can an iPad be used as a PC in business today? InfoWorld's Galen Gruman found out in hands-on tests. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobile Edge blog and Mobilize newsletter. ]

Here's the breakdown of intended iPad and tablet usage:

Although Apple has never positioned the iPad as a work device, and it certainly has limits in business settings today, users seem to be noticing the business potential for themselves, as are some forward-thinking business and IT leaders. In my ongoing informal conversations with vendors and IT managers, I keep hearing about the fascination many have with using the iPad at work across a wide range of industries: financial services, retail, hospitals, and all manner of field forces.

A couple examples: Intercontinental Hotel Group is piloting the use of iPads by its concierges at some hotels, so they're not tethered to a computer to help guests find directions and book services. And the D7 Consulting construction firm has given its onsite managers iPads to access construction drawings and othert support materials in the field.

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We have all experienced it - a computer crash, the blue screen of death, a program freeze and the worst of all, a hard drive failure resulting and data loss.  When faced with the following situations your crucial data may be lost or become inaccessible.  Here are some tips on solving that problem.

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Ever wonder how many PC's are sold per year?  What about per day, hour, minute?  These numbers are astonishing and frankly hard to really see how big they are.  So, we've done our best to show you a visual of the numbers and a few other amazing computer statistics.  We hope you enjoy, and please do SHARE!

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In the world of IT, there are a number of maintenance activities that need to be performed regularly in order to keep a network running smoothly. Much like changing the oil or rotating the tires on a car, system updates, backups, hard drive defragmentations and other processes are important for maintaining the overall health of a network or server. Many of these processes require system resources or even system down time, so a certain amount of planning and organization is required in order to minimize impact on end users or overall system performance. In addition, running too many of these tasks at the same time can cause these processes to slow down or even conflict with each other, further complicating the issues associated with system maintenance.

 For these reasons, we have strived to maintain a proper schedule when it comes to system maintenance tasks. Most of these services happen during off hours when end users will be impacted least. In addition, they are set up to run at specific times in order to minimize conflicts, such as updates causing the system to reboot while a backup is in progress. It also allows for greater troubleshooting. For instance, if we know all system updates occur on a specific night, it makes it easier to assess whether or not those patches are related to a specific issue that a system may be having. This kind of organization not only allows us to provide better service, but is also essential to ensuring proper system health while minimizing system down time.

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A couple of years ago we decided to dive into the world of server virtualization.  This is an amazing technology that allows us to run multiple operating systems on a single server. One server can act like many.  Microsoft servers run better when their tasks are focused. Take a mail server for example.   You wouldn’t want your mail server to also host your data files, database, web site and terminal server.  Maybe you have a program that doesn’t play nice with others.  Before virtualization, you would need to purchase a separate server for each of these tasks to have an ideal environment.  I’ve seen plenty of servers overloaded with tons of applications by clients trying to stretch their server dollar. Heck, I built some of them.  Servers can get expensive, especially when you need several.

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Have you ever been so mad at your computer that you scream? Admit it, we all do. This video proves that screaming at your computer might not be the best thing.
 

Without being too geeky, this person is measuring the speed of the drives and when he screams at them, there is a peak showing latency, or slower response time.

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If I’d asked anyone what a thousand gigabytes is called 10 years ago, they’d look at my like I was crazy.  No one could even fathom that much storage. 

A few months ago, Seagate announced the worlds largest desktop hard drive, 1.5 TB.  That TB means terabytes, otherwise known as 1,500 gigabytes, 1,500,000 megabytes, 1,500,000,000 kilobytes, you get the idea.  To put this in perspective do you remember those 5.25" black floppy drives?  It would take 2,343,750 of those disks to equal the size of this new harddrive.  Assuming they are 1/8" thick that would make a stack 292,968 Inches tall (That is 4.62 miles or 24,414 feet).  All this storage has been compressed into a rectangle that is only 1" thick.

That’s a lot of storage.  But is it really?  Do we need that much space on a desktop computer?  Why not?  Storage is cheap compared to what it was just a few years ago.  My first PC had a 10 megabyte hard drive.  That means I could store 10,000,000 characters of text.  Ten million wow!  Sure sounds like a lot until you compare it to todays world-that would barely hold 2 music downloads. 

I was lucky though, most PC’s in the late 80’s didn’t have hard drives at all, just a 5.25” floppy drive.  You’d put in the operating system floppy to boot up, then insert your program floppy to load the program you wanted to run, then insert a data floppy if you wanted to save what you were working on.  All this fit into 640 kilobytes of memory.  Pretty impressive in its day. 

In 1980, a 10 mb hard drive (just the drive, not the computer needed to run it) went for $3400.  Fortunately I got mine used from the university for $50 several years after.  We live in a digital age.  Almost anything can be stored in 1’s or 0’s; music, photos, videos, documents, you name it.  And it all takes up space.  And if its important 1’s and 0’s, like babies first steps on home video, it needs to be backed up, requiring more storage. 

I’m a fan of using a PC as a media hub in the home.  I will store all the kids DVD’s on my PC’s hard drive so we don’t have to worry about scratching or loosing disks.  These movies, uncompressed can take up to 8GB of space each.  With the introduction of Blu-Ray movies, these can take 50GB of space.  While these movies could be compressed, you loose quality in picture and sound.  I prefer to leave them in their native format, I don’t want to loose a single Pixar pixel.  My music is all stored on my hard drive and can be streamed to any room in the house.  Photos going back 10 years since my first digital camera are stored on my hard drive and can be easily brought up on the big screen for slide show night.  We never pull out photo albums anymore, and if it isn’t digitized, it gets lost.  So who needs all that space?  I’m certainly glad to have it.  Who knows, in a few years I may be boasting the benefits of my petabyte drive, amazed I used to fit it all in a few terabytes.

Terabytes in use
•    Wal-Mart's data warehouse in Middletown, Connecticut contains 500 terabytes of data as of 2004.
•    The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that "as of May 2008, the Library has collected more than 82.6 terabytes of data"
•    Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 terabytes of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.
•    LaCie released the world's first 1 TB external hard drive in early 2004.
•    Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte internal hard drive in 2007.
•    In 1993 total internet traffic was around 100 terabytes for the year.  As of June 2008, Cisco Systems estimated internet traffic at 160 terabytes per second.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte
 

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“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” - Albert Einstein 

For those of you that are following the blog, you may be interested to know that I am writing this post from my new Latitude E4300. Overall, I am fairly impressed with the combination of speed and portability. Usually you have to sacrifice one for the other. But I will leave that review for a different post. For anyone who has purchased a computer from I.T.NOW in the past year, you will truly be amazed by my next confession. I am running Vista on my new laptop. I also must confess that this is my third attempt at converting to Vista. Rumor has it that there is currently a pool going on at I.T.NOW betting on when I will switch back to XP (email Jason if you want in on it).  So why do I run Vista when I tell all of my customers to steer clear of it? I guess it is just one of the things I have to know. I can walk anyone through pretty much all functions of XP without having a computer in front of me, so it is time to achieve that same level of familiarity with Vista. That and when I try to install XP on my laptop, the solid state disk appears to cause a blue screen, in spite of how many things I have tried (and I have sadly tried several times).

So, what am I doing differently this time to ensure that I get a different result and don’t go insane? Here are a few tips for those of you who for one reason or another are on the Vista bus.

·         Don’t complain about it in front of your Mac friends. They will just talk to you about the latest “I’m a Mac” commercial and make you regret your decision.

·         Feed the beast. If you don’t have 4GB of memory, upgrade. If you don’t have a video card, consider adding one. If you can use a faster hard drive (10,000 RPM Raptor or a Solid State Disk), you won’t regret the price.

·         Unvistafy Vista. Part of what makes Vista more secure than XP is all of the extra layers of security, which means you have to click a lot more than you would have to on an XP machine. The technician in me has to warn you that this will make Vista less secure. But you wish you had XP, so this isn’t that big of a deal. Wired Magazine has a great Wiki on some steps you can take to clean up Vista.

·         Relax. In less than two years, you will get to do it all over again with Windows 7

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