In simple terms, RAID is basically a way of combining a group of hard drives together to form a single “virtual” drive. The main benefit is not only to obtain a bigger combined space but also to have data protection by having redundancy. This redundancy is achieved by duplicating the data in the additional drives, […]

Dia is a powerful free open source flowchart diagramming software; and it would be a true alternative to Visio if it wasn’t for a rather unfortunate flaw: the lack of nice, easy to understand network shapes. Let face it, network diagramming not only serves as a tool to help IT staff visualize a network but […]

  Let me start by saying that the only purpose of this article is to help you choose between OpenFiler and FreeNAS. I won’t waste time going into superficial issues like “GUI ease of use” or “installation tips” since, in the end, once you pass the learning curve, what’s really important is the performance and […]

  Moving WSUS files to another drive is sometimes necessary, specially when you do not anticipate the amount of space it can occupy from the start. WSUS update files can take an incredible amount of space and if you are performing a new installation and are not familiar with it, you might underestimate this space. […]

Continuing with our “converting to PDF” series, we are now going to take a look at Office 2010. With Office 2010 it is as easy as ever to convert your Word,  Excel, or Powerpoint files to PDF format. Microsoft has finally decided to include this option by default in the Office 2010 suite. In this […]

Unlike the new Office 2010 Suite, Office 2007 does not have the capability to convert and save its documents into PDF files natively. There is, however, the possibility of installing a plug-in provided by Microsoft for this purpose. For some reason, Microsoft did not include it with the 2007 Office package by default, however, it […]

Remember the days where the only way to convert a Word or Excel document to PDF was to purchase a $600 license of Adobe Acrobat? Things have changed a lot since then. Now, there is a variety of free programs you can choose from to convert your files. Prices of these programs vary greatly; they […]

Having the capability of booting from a USB drive in VMware is certainly useful, specially when you are creating and testing that bootable USB drive. However, neither VMware nor VirtualBox support booting from USB natively. Fortunately, there is a tool that will allow us to do just this, a free tool is called Plop. Plop […]

Since its beginnings, Windows Remote Desktop became an essential tool for IT professionals. There is not a day that goes by, that I don’t use it at work. It has saved me major aggravation, specially when I am at home and I need to access the office to solve any problem. A few days back […]

Why should we wipe free disk space on our hard drives? As you probably already know, once your recycle bin is emptied the files are not really erased; they just do not show up anymore and Windows uses the space whenever it is needed. The problem with this is that Windows writes randomly to the […]