IT Notes for Reference

I was recently reading an article by Rick Vanover from Techrepublic.com on resolving the physical location from an IP address. Nice and useful tool when needed. This of course would not give you the exact location, but basically the relative location based on Country, State, City and ISP. IP2Location

This is small utility used for finding one's Internal and External IP in one application. No install needed, just execute after unzipping. Yeah, I know you can also log onto your router to get the same info....but I found this a little bit faster and lazier ! IP2 Thanks to http://www.ezlan.net/ip_mac.html for the link!

Have you ever wondered how many Mega Bytes per Second your download serial bandwidth stream is when rated at 12.53 Mega Bits per second? Very easy conversion can be done quickly with multiple results with this helpful tool! iCal IBeast Bandwidth Calculator

Looks like another innovative and unique application was unveiled today by Google. Google Chrome OS would most likely be coming out, pre-installed on some netbooks sometime during the 2010 holiday season. The Operating System will be relying on an internet connection continuously to access applications and data online. It seems that there may be a good size group of users who might get by using Chrome OS for day to day function. Can't wait to see how this one turns out in the years to come. I've been a fan of Google for about 3 years now, and they continue to surprise and bring innovation. Chrome OS

I recently moved to Microsoft Security Essentials from Avira for my personal choice for Free based Anti-Virus software. The main issue I had with Avira was the random pop-up's I would get random times that would interfere with some important activities, mainly my Lord of the Rings Online time......during those pop-ups, my game would see a noticable slow down, so I thought it was time to move on from Avira. Other than that small issue, Avira has proved to be good Free based Anti-Virus choice in the past. It's been about 1 week so far with Microsoft Security Essentials, and it certainly looks I will be keeping this install and letting it continue to run in the background. No unwanted pop-up's or any other type of interferece besides the required memory resources needed to run in the background. So far so good with this one from Microsoft. Definetly a great addition to the line up of available Free Anti-Virus software for Windows based systems. http://www.microsoft.com/Securit...

I've been hearing mostly positive comments on Windows 7. Although I have yet to exprience the interface personally, It does look promising in a number of ways. Currently I'm sticking with Windows XP Pro on my main system and Linux Ubuntu 9.10 on my secondary system. I surely will not be paying $200-$300 for the Windows 7 upgrade since I see no need at this time. I recently read a good article on someone's exprience in upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7, which explains some of the pros and yes, cons, of Microsoft's new OS. http://www.gcn.com/Articles/2009/10/26/GCN-Lab-Review-Windows-7-Vista-by-another-name.aspx?Page=1

I've been using Mozy Online Backup for the last year so far and have been satisfied with it's easy to use and configure interface. I'm currently using the 2GB free service they offer and have had only one minor issue so far. I recently had to do an online restore for files I had backed up and ran into one problem. Mozy encrypts your data for security when it is saved on their backup servers. Any data you retrieve for restoration, is still in it's encrypted format. There is a Decryption utility that needs to be used before decrypting any data for use. I noticed that their decrypting utility was a dead link on their site, so I had to email support to retrieve it. The link for the decryption utility is: http://www.mozypro.com/downloads/mozyprocryptoutil.exe Apparently the link is broken on the "free" Mozy side of the web site........hopefully this will be fixed shortly. Other than this minor issue, Mozy seems to be good choice for free Online backup.