The Crash! continued...

As catastrophic as losing all the information on your hard drive can be, if you have performed consistent backups you should come out better in the long run.  Luckily, three weeks ago I began testing a new offsite backup product called Carbonite to back up my critical data on my notebook.  The backups took a little while to complete, about four days for 25 GB of data, but it made it very easy for me to get download my OneNote project files to another computer while I had the service department replace the drive and bring it up with a fresh load of Vista Ultimate.

It took about a week to reload the different applications that I run but I now have a system that is consistently faster, and doesn't have the garbage on it from loading and unloading test applications.  Refreshing your computer by doing a fresh load every 3 to 6 months does wonders for your productivity.  The downside is the time lost during the reconstruction.

During the down time, I was using my desktop from home at the office. I didn't want it to be joined to our network so I started using the terminal server client to access most of our applications that I run on a daily basis.  What struck me was how painless it was to be able to jump between the live windows session and the terminal session as I was doing different projects.  The one drawback I did find was that because I did not join this machine to the network was a little hard to move files between two sessions.  But it could be done without too much trouble. 

Now that I have the laptop up and loaded, I am running most of our legacy applications, we have some Access 97 databases, our accounting system, and our CRM program that are rather dated, on a terminal server. And I am running all my research with Internet Explorer, OneNote, and Office Applications in the notebooks operating system.  Because I'm using their RAM from the terminal server I have found that I'm running much faster than before when I have ten to twelve applications running at the same time.  It makes sense now that I think about it and I am glad that have taken advantage of this ability.

If you have any questions about the process I went through or if you want to know more about remote access and terminal services feel free to let me know and we can discuss this further.  Happy Easter!