Not Your Typical IT Guys

Every day I’m impressed with Windows 7.  Please, don’t get me wrong… I have sworn at Microsoft in the past and I am far from a Bill Gates groupie (unlike all you Steve Jobs groupies!)  I do however have an appreciation for a fine piece of technology… and this time W7 is it.  I’ve now been running W7 x64 for quite awhile on my beefy HP laptop and been very pleased with it’s performance and overall handling.  Here is my post about the upgrade from Vista.

With such good experience I didn’t hesitate a moment to install W7 on my daughters HP Netbook, 1GB RAM with 16GB Solid State Drive. When preparing for the install I was apprehensive because I read all these posts about how you couldn’t install W7 from anything other than a DVD, here was the hack to make it work, yadah yadah yadah. I decided to be bold and do my own thing, I went ahead and put the install package on a USB and installed a fresh copy to her netbook straight from the USB.  It installed without a hitch and it is running awesome!

So the Netbook was cool, but now it really gets good.

Sitting around the house is an old Dell Latitude D600.  When I say old I mean seriously old… circa 2004 :0P , 1.5 GHz Intel with 768MB’s of RAM. Even MS says W7 requires at least 1GB RAM… but I figured, why not.  The current Windows XP install with almost nothing else on the system barely runs and my youngest daughter needs a WebKinz machine.  So what the heck lets install a fresh copy of W7 on it and see what happens.

WOW!  It runs better than the day it came from Dell with Win XP.  Now in all fairness, the video leaves something to be desired but hey…so does the video on WebKinz World so it will do.  But other than that it really runs fantastic.  It installed every driver except the audio drivers during the OS install.  I downloaded the XP audio drivers from Dell and they installed without issue, game on!  I’ve been playing with this thing to really try to hose it up and I can’t, it really is solid.  The touch pad that wasn’t working on XP… now works, the Wireless Card that I had disabled on XP and replaced with a USB wireless…. now works!  The system really runs like a champ.

It has got me thinking… W7 is looking like a great candidate for revitalizing some old systems and turning them into Dumb Terminals for Citrix…… stay tuned…..

This has been unbelievable!  Over 72 inches of snow this year in MD and counting!! WOW, to be 12 years old again and all this means is no school, hot chocolate, snow ball fights and sledding…. such the life.

Now for those of us all grown up and have jobs to do and business to run and we can’t even get out of our house’s… shoveling..ugh!

Well, for myself, my business partner and 200 of our clients that’s not an issue.  We all have some form of Internet… in fact, my Comcast is out, but my cellular is on and I am working.

Our clients are sleeping well because the network is available to them and their staff, with all of their data and applications. 

• There are no fears about power outages at the office shutting down the servers and terminating remote access. 
• No fears of who is going to cycle the backup tapes.
• Technical support is available like every other day to help with their needs.
• Staff is staying productive.
• Business is continuing despite the SNOW!

I try not to use this blog as an in your face sales tool, but hey… sometimes it is nice to brag about ourselves…

So if you are at home right now reading this blog thinking about all that work piles up at the office and lord knows when anyone will be able to get to it, shoot me an email… or if you don’t have email right now give me a call, I’d love to tell you more about what Simplified Innovations can do for you.

Another day, another lesson learned!  So when Daniel and I initially embarked on our journey we struggled with our corporate name.  Should it be off the wall? Unique? Say something about us? Be specific to the service we offer? Have a cool acronym? on and on…. Put it this way… for me, my second daughter wasn’t named until she was 4 days old (my wife and I didn’t disagree we just couldn’t commit to the name)… so lets say naming things is a painful process!!

Then one day Daniel had a light bulb moment.  Hosted Solutions Inc… its perfect!  It sounds good, it says what we do but isn’t too specific and it flows.  One downer is the domain is already taken but hey, they own data centers so that can’t be that big of a deal.  Oops… apparently it is.

Sparing you the specifics we are changing our name.  Which honestly is OK with me because lets face it, how many of you heard our name and said, “Oh, so you host websites?”  Not quite but it sure sounds like we do!  In addition, hosting has meaning right now but how about in 10 years when everything is hosted? It will be like the automatic transmission was, but now you have to request the manual because automatic is standard.  So 10/15 years down the line “Hosted” will have less meaning anyway.

As they say, everything has a reason for happening and at the end of the day we are better becuase of it.  So its a new year and a new name.  Of course we went thought the same dreadful process of coming up with an name and oh by the way, add the whole Trade Mark part of the discussion to it.  I honestly believe that at some point we will have to add more than 26 letters to the alphabet for new companies starting out after 2010, there are not many options left!!

However we found one we are happy with and that we think sums up our existence and is timeless,  Simplified Innovations Inc, and the best part a new domain that matches, http://SimplifiedInnovations.com

We are working to re-brand everything… and soon enough Simplified Innovations will roll off the tongue smoother than HSI ever did.

Here’s to looking forward to a great 2010 and beyond!!!