How often do you find yourself at home, wishing you had emailed yourself those files from your work computer that you had hoped to finish that evening? Or perhaps you were working on something on your home computer and saved it to your flash drive in order to take it to work, but in your morning rush, left the flash drive plugged into the USB port? Wouldn’t it be nice to have remote access to your computer from a distance? With certain technology, that fantasy is becoming a reality for everyone.

Small Business
For some small businesses, remote control of computers is not a mere convenience, it is an absolute necessity. Sometimes businesses are so small there are only employees in one geographical area, and managers are several hours away. For these individuals, being able to access computers in other locations would finally enable them to be in two places at one time.

Other professionals work out of multiple locations, perhaps from the office a few days a week, and from home or a laptop on the road the others. Shuffling folders and files from one hard drive to another or relying on an unpredictable network can have disastrous consequences. (more…)

Windows Vista was released to the general public on January 30, 2007 with hundreds of new and improved features and upgraded security – allegedly. The predecessor of Vista, Microsoft’s Windows XP was released five years prior, making it the longest span of time between two new Microsoft operating systems.

With the long wait for a new Microsoft operating system, there was quite a bit of hype surrounding the release. To add to the buildup, this was Bill Gates’s last anticipated launch, since he plans to step down in the next year in order to focus on philanthropic efforts. Despite the hype, however, or perhaps because of it, the public’s reception of the new operating system was definitely disappointing to Microsoft.

Insufficient Speed
According to tests run by a research and development company comparing Windows Vista with its big brother, Windows XP outperformed Vista in every single test. The new operating system is slow and less responsive. XP proved to load more quickly and had a higher responsiveness than Vista, regardless of the computer system and memory allocation available on the variety of computers used in the tests. In some cases, Vista took twice as long to perform even menial tasks, such as auto saving and creating a new document.

Copycat
Again, Microsoft has been accused of copying Apple with some of the new features available on their recently released operating system. Defenders of Microsoft assert that the company was only including aspect that would come naturally as the Windows operating system evolves. Regardless of whether Microsoft unabashedly “borrowed” some ideas from their rival or not, Vista has enough problems to deal with. (more…)