Some techs seem to get by with just a multitool and a smile, but the rest of us need something more substantial. Here are 10 essential items to carry with you whenever you make a desktop call.When a trip to an end user’s machine is necessary, there’s no time for fumbling for the right tool. But many times, you arrive at the user’s desk and find yourself unprepared to fix the problem.

In an ideal world, you’d have everything needed at your fingertips–a sort of ultimate toolkit. In the real world, you can still arrive prepared if you stock your toolkit with a few essential hardware items. Some of these tools may require some creative shopping, but you can find most of them in your local hardware store. Here are just a few of the items on the list:

* Needlenose pliers/cutters (straight and curved)
* Hemostats
* Small mirror on telescoping handle
* Phone and AC line testers
* Paper clip (of course)

If you are looking to fight spam coming through your emails system, I recommend Barracuda Networks.  We have been using the Barracuda 600 for about a year and recently went with a Barracuda 400 for some additional domains.  Both of these units have worked well for us and we have been happy with their performance.  The Barracuda 600 has been out performing our previous set up which was a farm of Spamassassin servers.  Go with Barracuda, they are a little pricy, but you get what you pay for.

Takeaway: Methods for preventing internal security breaches that work in a small company environment generally don’t scale well as the organization gets larger. Here’s how you develop a scalable strategy for preventing breaches as your company grows.

Many companies focus their security strategies on keeping outsiders from getting into the network. Yet a large percentage of serious security breaches come from within. Some of these are deliberate and others are unintentional, but either way they can put your network and the data on it at risk and result in lost productivity and/or direct monetary loss.

As your business grows, it’s important that your security strategy be able to evolve to meet your changing needs. This is especially true when it comes to protecting against internal threats, because the methods that work in a small company environment generally don’t scale well as the organization gets larger. Let’s look at how you develop a scalable strategy for preventing internal security breaches.

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I found a new tool called Hitman Pro 2.  Basically you download the application and install it.  The application then downloads 6 top rates spyware prevention/cleaning apps and installs them.  Himat then updates them and executes them all without user intervention.  You can spend 5 minutes downing and installing the Hitman and let it work for the next 2 hours cleaning up your PC.  Pretty cool!

If you’re like me, you probably have thousands of digital photos and documents that you want to backup or copy to external media. In my case, I copy everything to an external 160GB XIMETA NetDisk for safe keeping. I have used the free version of Allway Sync in the past, and I’ve had very good results. However, we recently released a handy tool for Windows XP called SyncToy, and based on my few days of experience, it appears to do everything I need. Here are a few of its features:

• Provides easy and flexible copying, moving, and synchronization of files in different directories
• Manages multiple sets of directories at the same time
• Can combine files from two folders in one case, and mimic renames and deletes in another
• Keeps track of renames to files and will make sure those changes get carried over to the synchronized folder
• Configuring SyncToy is as easy as setting up one or more folder pairs and corresponding actions for each pair. For example, I might setup one pair to synchronize changes between two folders (which works both ways) and setup another pair to simply echo changes from one folder to another (echo is the action I use for backup purposes). If you want to get more specific, there are additional options that can be configured.

If you’d like to know what operations SyncToy would perform on your folder pairs, you can run the convenient preview feature. The preview feature analyzes the folders, then tells you what it would do if it ran, but—most importantly—it doesn’t actually make any of the changes. This is a great way to get comfortable with the tool before letting it loose on your precious files. And if you want to automatically process your folder pairs, there’s even a topic in the help file (lookup Schedule in the index) that explains how to schedule SyncToy to run on a periodic basis.

Download SyncToy v1 Beta for Windows XP or to learn more, grab the whitepaper titled: Synchronizing Images and Files in Windows XP Using Microsoft SyncToy.