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- Hannah Saxton, MD, My Chocolate Ltd

- Nigel Hobden, MD, Random Group Ltd

- John Whellams, Managing Consultant, Rosswell Consulting

Register Domain, Host Domain, Host Website.

These three things can be accomplished by one entity.

Recommended service provider: Bluehost

Build Website.

This is something you may need to spend money on. If its a simple site you’ll want to host it with the company hosting your domain, and possibly build it yourself. If necessary, get a web design company involved.

In-house or Hosted Infrastructure?

This decision will affect all others from the PCs you buy to the data line you need. In truth it’s a complicated decision that can’t be decided from a simple flowchart but some factors to consider are:

* How important is uniform remote access to data?
* How important is disaster recovery?
* Do you trust your data and applications in the hands of a third-party?
* Do you want your users to have restricted, standardised desktops?
* Do you want control over your IT?

If you decide not to maintain an in-house infrastructure, the next choice is whether to go for:

* Fully hosted desktops
* A hosted server
* Hosted Exchange

The latter is the cheapest option and possibly the most viable for one-man-band startups.

Recommended service provider: 123Together

Data Connectivity.

This is another decision with many factors but loosely speaking, if your data/applications are hosted, you’re going to want a faster, more reliable data line than if everything is in house. Likewise if many users will need remote access to your in-house server, you’ll need more upstream bandwidth.

Options include ADSL, SDSL, Leased Line.

Backup

Depends on the amount of data and the capacity of your data line, but Internet backup is becoming more and more viable.

Recommended service provider: Mozy

Slow PC

The bane of the computer user and IT support professional alike. You hate it because you spend your day clicking through treacle. We hate it because “my computer’s slow” is the vaguest, and yet one of the most common issues we have to face. Best of all, when you finally do get someone to look at your PC, nine times out of ten it’s running just fine.

Here’s a few of the most common causes:

- Too many startup programs running. Many, if not most programs have the audacity to install either themselves, or some (un)helpful little widget as a startup item. Disable as many of these as you possibly can.

- Automatic Updates can get its knickers in a twist and hog the CPU without you knowing it. If this happens consider doing manual updates instead.

- Speaking of CPU hogs, virtually any program can become one. Word or Outlook might not close properly, leaving nothing on screen but the process running in the background, eating CPU cycles. Open Task Manager and find out what’s going on.

- If Task Manager reports a generic process like ‘svchost’ is the culprit, download Process Explorer and find out what’s running within that process.

- Do you have enough memory? 512MB for XP and 1GB for Vista should be considered the bare minimum. Double those amounts if you want any hope of decent performance.

Slow Outlook

As the single most relied-upon application on most PCs, Outlook has a host of unique potential issues that can quash performance.

Firstly understand how Outlook works in an Exchange environment. It takes and maintains a complete copy of your Exchange mailbox, attempting to keep this file in sync. This file can become corrupted and fragmented, and the larger your mailbox the greater the chance of this happening.

Solution? Delete the file, forcing Outlook to recreate it. Search your PC for files with the extension ‘OST’ to find it.

On the topic of mailbox size, you should not only be mindful of the overall size, but also the number of items in each folder. Microsoft recommends no more than 5000 items per folder for the sake of performance. I’ve frequently seen mailboxes with 50,000-plus sent items and while Outlook is still usable, culling that number tenfold will often bring an equivalent increase in speed.

Outlook is beholden to its plugins. Generally speaking, the more you have the slower Outlook runs. You know that neat little tool that lets you view attachments in a slide-show? How about the one that makes mail merging slightly less of a hassle? If you need them use them, but if something saves you two minutes every month at the cost of making Outlook slower and less stable it isn’t really fulfilling its purpose.

My last tip on this is that Outlook is reliant on Word for editing emails. If Word misbehaves then Outlook is left out to sea. Check whether WINWORD.exe is running if Outlook inexplicably locks up and you can sometimes bring it back to life by killing Word.

Internet (Dis)Connectivity

ADSL is both brilliant and awful. It’s made broadband financially viable for the masses and out of it has grown the streaming, media-rich Internet of today. The downside is it’s built on a telecoms infrastructure that’s very, very old. Meaning a lot of the cabling is very old, and ill-equipped to reliably carry a high-frequency broadband signal.

The result? Massively variable speeds and frequent dropouts.

Most frustrating is the glacial response of virtually all broadband providers when you report such a fault. Typically, the provider relies on BT and BT have a series of hoops to jump through before allowing a fault to be raised. Some of these are extremely unreasonable:

- Try a different router. Because we all have 5 spare lying around.
- Replace all our microfilters.
- Try plugging direct into the Master socket. This literally involves unscrewing every socket you have until you find the one that’s secreting the mythical ‘Master socket’.

Were you to actually do all the above, in 9 out of 10 cases, you will see no improvement. What you have done is buy both BT and your provider some extra time to twiddle their fingers.

My advice? As you are logging the fault, announce to the operator that you have “tried your other router, replaced the microfilters and are plugged into the master socket” to save yourself some time and get the ball rolling. Ultimately ADSL is a lottery. The winners enjoy a fast, stable Internet connection while the losers spend more time speaking to India than they do their mothers. This is the lie of the land until BT managed to roll out a country-wide FTTP (100MB fibre) to replace ADSL.

Wireless, Data-less

The number of current wireless network issues in the world is roughly approximate to the number of wireless networks in the world. More so than even ADSL, you can consider yourself extremely lucky if you have a consistently working wireless network. In my position I’ve seen Zyxels that don’t like Macs, Linksys that don’t like Vista, Airports that don’t like PCs, and almost every combination thereof. It’s perfectly normal to have a wireless network that works happily with almost any machine you bring into your home except one. Usually the one you use the most. Likewise you may find that to be the one network your PC ever has trouble connecting to.

What can you do? Update the firmware on your access point. Update the firmware and drivers on your wireless card. Beyond that, and ensuring your OS is up to date, there’s not much you can do if you get stuck other than change one or the other.

Aside from these irritating issues, its not uncommon to find a wireless network simply stops working one day. It could be because a neighbour has gone and set up their own wireless network operating on the same channel. Certainly our collective airwaves are becoming more and more flooded, and so long as it’s not a nearby microwave or hoover that’s causing the problem, you should be able to change the channel on your access point to bring it back.

Bottom line – wireless isn’t there yet. If you want to decrease the number of variables in your IT setup, use a cable. It won’t let you down.

When Blackberries Go Rotten

In truth, Blackberries are robust little devices that generally do what you want them to. However both BIS and BES devices can inexplicably stop receiving email. BIS accounts tend to stop checking your email if the email server is unavailable for any length of time. In that case you simply need to re-validate the account by logging in to your portal (i.e. mobileemail.vodafone.net for Vodafone) and click ‘validate’.

But first of all – what coverage do you have? Look in the top-right of the home screen. Anything other than 3G, GPRS or EDGE (in caps) means you won’t receive email.

If it’s a BES device you can spend hours troubleshooting or do what most administrators do and try wiping then re-activating the device. This goes for any other issues you may have such as read/unread status not syncing etc. Wiping and re-activating is more effective if you also delete and then re-add the BES user before you do so.

Problems activating a new BES BB? Check and then double-check that the network has correctly provisioned the device for BES. Many, many times I’ve encountered problems caused by Vodafone/O2/whoever sending out a shiny new BB with the wrong APNs applied.

Note #1 – This only works with Microsoft Exchange mailboxes.
Note #2 – You must have permissions to the other mailbox.

1. Right-click ‘Mailbox – (your name)’ in the navigation pane.
2. Click ‘Properties for Mailbox – (your name)’.
3. Click ‘Advanced’.
4. Click the Advanced tab.
5. Click ‘Add’.
6. Enter the name or part of the name of the user whose mailbox you are adding.
7. Click ‘OK’ twice.