Re-Image, a new software program designed as a unique app that works as an in-place Windows re-installer, is specifically designed for those people that either can’t afford a qualified computer technician, or simply don’t have the time. A wonderful idea seeing as it can replace faulty system files, but Windows already comes with this. So then why pay $70.00 a year for a redundant program? Mainly because most Windows users are unaware of how to run the program, and of course we suggest a technical support professional to handle issues such as these.

Here at Phoenix Synergy, we refer to it as a “Refresh”, reinstalling Windows without formatting the drive or over-writing any application files. Basically, it takes all the files from the original CD and puts them back in place. Once that is done, re-run Windows Updates to re-apply the service packs, and ensure your Windows OS files and registry settings are set to default. Usually, starting your computer up in “Safe-Mode” and running a mal-ware scanning program can alleviate much of the pain. Regardless of the route chosen, always take these precautionary measures to ensure computer safety:

• Backup your System
• Run a Virus Scan
• Run a Mal-ware Scan
• Start your computer in “Safe-Mode” with networking and run the same Mal-ware scan
• Ensure your Anti-Virus is up-to-date

The new technology that is consistently being release requires companies like Apple to create these necessary data-centers. The Maiden, North Carolina location, said to have a biogas fuel-cell plant and a massive solar array that will collect 60% of the necessary energy for day-to-day activities, is under scrutiny by Greenpeace; accused of relying too much on coal-produced power and Apple has since refused to provide any new data. This ambiguity in knowing if something is or is not environmentally friendly brings about many questions if you’re thinking about using systems like iCloud. The best thing to do would be to look around locally, centers that aren’t owned by market Juggernauts, and check into their housing centers to see how environmentally friendly it is to work local. For example, here at Phoenix Synergy we’re a Tier 4 data-center powered by the Palo Verde nuclear power plant. Using a local company means not having to worry about high demand from millions of other consumers and also the peace of mind that you can easily help the planet.

More to come from Apple:

1. New iPad

2. More Data – Centers

3. Large growth in sales in China

Ba-dum-tss

That password is probably one of the most difficult things you could ever try to remember; most likely no one in their lifetime will ever guess it. But you don’t need a password as gargantuan as that in order to ensure internet safety. Simple passwords are easy to remember, but run the risk of easily being guessed, like the infamous “Password1”.  Here are a few steps to make sure you have a keeper:

• Split the word into multiple pieces with different numbers (ie. Shen2ani8gans)
• Use a variety of capital to non-capital letters (ie. ShEn2AnI8gAnS)
• Don’t use a word at all, use a combination of random letters and numbers (ie. u472bmt)
• Definitely do not use a word that has anything to do with you or the site, for example don’t use the word “sand” if your last name is “Sanders”
• If allowed use special symbols (ie. Shen2>ani8<gans)

So once, you’ve created the most magical-impossible-to-be-hacked password on the planet, how are you going to remember it? That all depends on your ability to remember things and what you specifically need to do in order to remember something. One method you can use is to create a phrase that would hint very specifically at the pass word; for example one of the examples above u472bmt sounds like “You Force Heaven to Be Empty”. Now with all this useful information you should be about as secure as the Pentagon, assuming of course that they don’t use “Password1”

 Wrong.

 An individual cloud server on its own is unprotected and vulnerable. At times certain companies may think they can skip over the redundancy plan and save money and cross their fingers that nothing happens. If you happened to be one of the companies using Amazon as a provider earlier this year you would have been subjected to the 24-48 hour outage. Seeing as every day counts for sales and business, those two days would have been devastating. However, Amazon does offer a plans to cover these issues, but at a much higher cost. At this point, everyone would be thinking, “If I can’t rely on names that I thought could be dependable, who do I turn to for help?” Phoenix Synergy combines the beauty of cloud with the security of an individual system. Considering we’re housed in a Tier 4 Data Center, we can provide a reliably safe housing environment, emergency power and a guaranteed redundancy plan.

Ice Cream Sandwich, informally based upon Linux kernel 3.0.1, introduced amazing new features that allowed for a much wider range of capabilities. For example you can now control your network data usage, depending on your data plan you can now set off a warning when getting close to going over limits or cut data usage off by setting a hard limit that can disable mobile data until next month. Now you can perform actions while on your lock screen, re-size widgets, add trays and tabs, fiddle with the new keyboard, and use your face to unlock your phone. By taking advantage of the front-facing camera and new technology allows the device to be unlocked by recognizing facial features.

The minimal 3% of ICS connected Android devices seems ridiculous with all the capabilities that are now offered compared to previous versions. Gingerbread, forefather to ICS, claims 63.7% with the remaining percent using their ancestors. Sprint, a nationwide provider, doesn’t offer any devices connected with Ice Cream Sandwich and is very slowly revealing the de-bugged versions of Gingerbread. With Sprint being one of the nations’ top providers and not one device being offered with ICS, profitability may be an issue (addressed in previous article). As Android continues to dominate the market, Ice Cream Sandwich will see an increase of usage; proof being that Google stated previously in March that only 1.6% of devices were using ICS. Good luck to Google, I’ll be awaiting the future upgrade. For everyone else if the wait is too long and you decide to spend your time blogging, as I will, if you need any ideas on designing your web page take a look at Arizona Web Page Design. If design isn’t your forte and would rather market your existing site, Digital Marketing Specialists can always help.

Sources: TG Daily, Google Plus, Android

There are three different versions of Citrix XenServer; the Enterprise Version, the Standard Version and the Express Version. Of these XenServer versions, the Express Version can be used for free. There are some limitations though; the most important of which being that XenServer Express offers virtualization for one server only. That is you can install more than one server with XenServer Express, but there is support for only one server in the XenCenter management application. Nevertheless, it offers an excellent way to get familiar with the Xen way of doing things.

Getting It

Getting Citrix XenServer Express is easy; it’s a free download from Citrix . If you plan to install virtualized Linux machines as well, don’t forget to download the XenSource Linux support cd image. Otherwise, you won’t be able to virtualize Linux.

Once the XenSource installation cd is burned, installing the product itself is easy. Boot from the cd and all the work is done automatically. The installation program asks if you want to install a XenServer host or if you want to convert a physical machine to a virtual machine (VM). The latter is pretty cool since no open source Xen version offers an easy physical to virtual (P2V) solution.

The XenServer installation cd offers you the option to install a XenServer host and an easy way of doing P2V conversion.

The installation process itself is pretty straightforward and looks a lot like the Red Hat Linux installation program. But there is one thing that you should always remember: To install Windows virtual hosts, you do need hardware support for virtualization. If you don’t, then the installation program warns you that you can install Linux virtual hosts only. Of course, when Windows Server 2008 becomes available this will change since you can install it in paravirtualized mode.

Managing Virtual Machines

Once installed you can get familiar with the reason why you should have a look at Citrix XenServer: the XenCenter management application. Sorry if you like to use a Linux workstation because this application is available for Windows only. You can install it with the XenCenter client install program that is available on the XenServer installation cd.

XenCenter offers the easy accessible XenServer management interface.

The first step in XenCenter is to add your server. Once you’re connected to your XenServer hosts, you’ll find that some prerequisites have to be met before you can continue. First, you need to configure storage. XenServer assumes that you’re connected to an SAN so you need to indicate what SAN access protocol to use. Local storage can be used, but it’s complicated to set up. Also, the installation of your favorite operating system isn’t always easy.

When installing Linux, the installer assumes that you’re using an installation server.

You can install Windows from a local cd or dvd but if you want to install Linux, you must refer to a URL on an installation server. In future articles you will learn how to perform these tasks.

Tools:

All of the management tools need to mature, in the mean time Xen again has them beat in our opinion.  One interface for all Hosts and Guests, ESXI seems to have that going for it too, but the interface on the free versions (which is all we are covering here) is much more limited.

Performance:

Xen server’s performance is unmatched.

The best way to describer a virtual server is to imagine you’ve taken a full snapshot of your entire server and then you boot it inside another system.  There are many tools that help you do this, even free tools.  These technologies range from VMWare to Xen server and even tools you might use on your Mac, like Fusion and Parallels, are virtualization tools.

We have identified two basic situations when it’s obviously and unarguably time to go virtual:

1) Your servers hardware is over 4 years old.

2) You want high availability.

In both cases there’s no complicated logic-tree to traverse to conclude what you need to do.  Any network admin will tell you that in both cases above the virtual route must be seriously considered, and here’s why:

If your server is old then there are several problems:

a) it’s not safe, you can’t trust the hardware, too risky.

b) It’s going to run much slower than the newer server hardware, so consider it slow.

c) it’s time to take a full snapshot and recover it (virtualize) so you can sleep better knowing it’s safe.

If you want high availability you’ve probably priced-out of using the clustering options years ago.  An Extra 30K in operating system and software licenses, yet alone the shared disk and power requirements.  This is why now is the time to re-think your disaster recovery, high availability needs, because virtual servers are far easier to work with, and can be setup to be moved from server to server with ease.

Consider purchasing a new, low-end server (which is going to be higher than your four year old “high-end” server ever was).  Now consider taking a snapshot of your old server and placing it inside this new hardware.  Now double it.    That’s right, buy two new servers, and place your old one inside both.  That’s a simple “active-passive” cluster, you’ve got it setup on both, now just boot one of them and keep the other up-to-date with current snapshots on a regular schedule and your set.

So now you have high-availability without the price tag.  Not only that but you’ve justified the move by also having a faster more stable server, and better backups.

We specialize in virtual servers, you can take a snapshot of your old server, even your firewall.

Other great uses:

It’s perfect for development environments where you are hoping to spin up new QA servers for testing, and doing version control on the entire server (not just the code).  Sometimes a snapshot of how the server is configured, the website the database, the random third party app you had to deploy that you forget about when it’s time to go live.

Benefits:

• You can easily run multiple operating systems on one system.
• You can save on your power bill.
• You can go green, less resources.
• Training your Staff.

Products we support:

1. Create a Customized Tab on the Office 2010 Ribbon

A brand new feature for Office 2010 is the ability to custom-tailor the ribbon interface by adding customizable ribbons. It’s simple and really helps users get going in Office 2010 who might be more comfortable with older versions of the office interface. All you do is right-click on the ribbon interface and select “Customize the Ribbon”. From there we add a new tab, label it whatever we like, and add any features we want. If you want  to have some tools from the “Insert” tab and other features from the “Review” tab all lumped together to make your work-flow easier, you can.

2. Find Office 2003 Commands in Office 2010

Customizing is great, but what if you just want to get up to speed with the new design? Microsoft has thoughtfully designed really useful how-to guides for getting used to their user interface changes. It’s called the “Office 2010 interactive guide”, and it can be located at this link: http://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/learn-where-menu-and-toolbar-commands-are-in-office-2010-HA101794130.aspx

3. Bring Office 2003 Menus Back to 2010 with UBitMenu

If  learning about or customizing the new ribbon interface doesn’t make you or one of your worker’s comfortable, or you just don’t want to use it, there’s actually a great option for bringing back the old look. It’s not exactly Microsoft-sanctioned, but it’s called UBitMenu. It’s a small utility you install after you’ve installed Office 2010, and it automatically inserts an old style menu into the ribbon interface. Find the utility here: http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/

4. Crop Pictures in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

It’s an old problem. Inserting images in Word or Excel is pretty simple and straight forward, but getting them to fit right can be a real time suck. That’s mostly because it was impossible to crop the photo at all. You simply select the “Format” tab in the ribbon, and click the “crop” option. This will allow you to select any of an inserted image’s four corners and drag the border in to where you need it. Select “crop” again, and voila, your image fits. Handy.

5. Center Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010

This used to be another big pain in older versions of Word. Getting an image to be right where you want it in a document used to be endlessly fussy, but now you can center an image easily. After inserting an image, change it’s “word wrap” setting to anything BUT “In Line with Text”. This will free the image up to be aligned however you like.

6. Take Screenshots with Word 2010

Some more advanced users know how to use the inefficient “print screen button”, but for most users, taking a snapshot of something on their PC is a little beyond them. Office 2010 makes it dead simple. You just select “Insert” tab and click the “Screenshot” button. It will present you with the available windows, and you can select which program you’d like to snapshot. It will then automatically insert that snapshot in to the document. Neat.

7. Add Security to Your Important Documents in Office 2010

Working on a document you want to make sure stays away from prying eyes? Office 2010 has a built-in encryption feature that allows you to password-protect individual documents. All you have to do is click the “File” button, click “Info”, click “Protect Document” and then select “Encrypt with Password”. There are several other options on that menu as well for other types of file security.

That was just a basic sample of what Office 2010 can do to improve workflow and security.