I know it sounds incredibly cocky of me to say this but I now consider myself a pro in this Design, Marketing and Internet field. I’m not saying I’m the best, but I definitely do have an edge as well as years of experience in this area so I will reveal the software and hardware I use. When I choose these these things I take into consideration multiple angles and purposes. Not all of my gear is top-notch gear that provides best performance - some of them are optimized for the scale of my business to meet the balance between budget and functionality.

Hardware

Macbook Pro 15.4″ 2.2 gHz - I have the newest (as of early 2008) Macbook Pro by Apple Computer (in case you didn’t know). I run OSX Leopard (version 10.5) and with VMWare I run Windows XP Professional with SP2. This cost me $2200 Canadian plus the 2 year extended warranty and tax. Cost me almost $3,000 with everything in.

Toshiba M60CD4 - It’s my old Toshiba laptop, which has a dead screen. It cost me $1500 and tax back in late 2005. It’s been my longest lasting laptop I’ve owned so far unless the new Macbook beats it. It is connected to the external monitor, and I mainly use it for some coding stuff, and also to test websites on Internet Explorer 6. It sits on my desk, closed, so it’s more or less a desktop. It helps when I need to look something up quick, without having to open my Macbook out of its case.

Acer 22″ Widescreen LCD - The LCD screen is my secondary monitor for my Macbook, and also for the Toshiba. It cost $289 and tax, and it’s given be exceptional value so far. It’s a great way to extend your desktop to have more space and improve work efficiency.

HP CM1015MFP - This is my massive multifunction color laser printer. It is a relatively new model with a scanner and all. Cost me nearly $500 plus tax. The print quality is great, and it’s great for producing print proofs and invoices that look sleek and clean. My industry relies largely on image, so even invoice printing out of an inkjet printer looks bad. Hence the investment for a printer that cost 5 times as much as a generic multifunction would.

Logitech Mouse/Keyboards - I won’t list the models but I only purchase Logitech brand mouse/keyboard combinations. I have a wireless keyboard/mouse set, as well as a wired laser mouse that I carry around with my Macbook.

Blackberry 7250 - This is my primary phone, and of course, I get emails. It gives me much more mobility when I need to reply to urgent emails and what not. Sounds like the everyday marketing phrase but I’m really not restricted to my home office, or even my laptop at all times. Which is great. This is the older model of the Blackberries, and this is the sturdiest blackberry ever made, in my opinion, and I don’t care if everybody else flashes their brand new Blackberry World 8830s or Blackberry Pearls. I like mine the best.

It’s a given fact that laptops bring more mobility, and it’s also a hassle to run both laptop and desktop for data integration purposes. Mobility in businesses is increasing day by day, and the efficiency of our society as a whole is increasing along with it. Laptops are becoming cheaper and much more affordable and more businesses and individuals are transitioning over to the laptop and blackberry driven world. Here are some things that are needed in order for our workforce and society as a whole to improve our efficiency.

Backup System

A solid backup system is a must if you are to enter the world of mobile computing. Most businesses will understand that data inside a laptop is much more important than the laptop itself. Laptops are more likely to be lost, stolen, or damaged during transportation. Without a solid backup system, the fate of your data goes hand-in-hand with your laptop hardware. With an automated backup that is done on a regular basis, you can be assured that even if something happens to your laptop, your data is safe.

Mandatory Wireless

Any office and meeting room should be equipped with high-speed wireless, and this needs to be a standardized culture in the business world. For the business itself, its employees, as well as other visitors and clients that may be coming to your office, providing them with wireless internet is a great thing to promote the spread of mobile computing.

Increasing Reliance on Web Based Software

Web based software is becoming more and more common as servers are becoming more powerful, and the increase of internet speed helps it too. Web based software is an amazing tool when it comes to collaboration, productivity, and data security. Let’s face it - you’re more likely to get your laptop stolen at a coffee shop than you are to have your server data hacked out. You may argue that many hackers can do it but the reality is, a lot of hacks or bombs are ones that simply paralyze the server, rather than take data out in a sophisticated manner. Having web based software also helps for frequent travelers. You can access much of your work data and communication without having to be at the office on your desktop. Corporate intranets will slowly disappear as web based, or internet based (as opposed to intranet) software becomes more and more dominant.

Security Habits, Safety Habits

Your laptop probably contains lots of private data that needs to be secured. While there is no such thing as 100% security, you can always use measures to reduce the likelihood of a data loss in the event of theft or loss of a laptop. Most laptop theives will simply re-install the software and sell it to somebody else. If the laptop itself has a secure password on its OS, it’s very difficult for anybody to get into the files and access them. Put yourself in the shoes of a petty laptop thief. Try to hack the data, or just re-install factory setting software and sell it for $300? It’s an easy one to answer.

Also try to develop the habit of keeping your laptop with you at all times. I never leave my laptop in my car unless my vehicle is in my plain view. Even when I go into restaurants, I will bring my briefcase in with me so that my laptop is secure. It is very rare that my laptop leaves my side unless I leave it at home.

As I mentioned, I had a hard drive failure which resulted in a lot of losses. It was absolutely brutal.

My last back up was October 21st, before my trip to Costa Rica. And then last Wednesday, so around the 14th of November is when my hard drive crashed. The hard drive is beyond repair - the only way to get the data out of there was by a very expensive data recovery service ($400~$500 or so for a physical extraction of the magnetic disk and so forth), and by the time I was set up on my new Macbook Pro while waiting to see if the tech support could extract the files through external mounting via USB, I had re-done a lot of my work. So it wasn’t worth it for me to pay that much money for recovery services.

A great lesson I learned is to back up my data more frequently, because you never know what may happen. My new Macbook Pro has the Time Machine feature, so the backup worries are now over. The Apple Website has more about the Time Machine.

Many of you probably remember the post I wrote about iFags after I returned my first Macbook Pro in March. This time I decided to give another shot at the Macbook Pro, and with the new OSX Leopard System in place, it proved to be a much nicer journey.

I will still state that there are a lot of things that are very frustrating or not very functional when it comes to Macs, but there are also pros in how the desktop and icons work, how stable it runs Illustrator and Photoshop, and also the Time Machine automatic backup feature, so the balance is tipping this time in favour of the Mac as my main unit.

I still miss Office 2007 dearly, and I am trying to get a hold of a version of Windows Vista so I can use Office 2007 through VM Ware Fusion, which is the software that allows me to run a separate instance of Windows (or any other OS) embedded within the OSX system as I work. So that means I can switch between Mac Apps and Windows Apps instantly, or even have a window of a Window (play on words!!) running at the same time, as if it were a whole program on its own.

I still run my Windows XP computer at my home office which I adore dearly.

As I had no hope of reviving my laptop on my own, I took my laptop to Futureshop to see if they can use their equipment to extract the data out of the hard drive. Turns out the hard drive itself is damaged, and even getting the data out of the thing will take overnight. So I was forced to make a quick decision on another laptop as i desperately need one.

Here’s how the problem occurred most recently - Windows Vista is not quite the most stable thing you can imagine, and on every sleep-wake cycle due to shutting the laptop lid, it takes a very long time to load. On Wednesday I was using my laptop on the road, and as I opened it, it was quite slow to come back up to speed. Anyhow, I used it with Firefox (which by the way has glitches while running on Vista) to browse some pages, and even though I had no other major applications running (such as Dreamweaver or Photoshop) it just decided to do a full out crash. The mouse pointer stopped moving altogether. So I had to press the power button to do a force re-boot.

It didn’t quite boot. I kept getting either a black screen, or a flashing blue-screen-of-death before it went into a re-start on its own. The furthest I would get to was the green loading bar graphic, and then that was it.

My friend has finally convinced me, again, to try out a Mac, as they are much more stable, and won’t have the crashing issues, and I won’t have to do the re-install-the-OS routine every few months to keep it running fast and new (I’ve been doing that always with my Window XP/Vista laptops).

Last time I tried out a Macbook Pro, it didn’t work out so well as I got very frustrated with the whole new interface that was not as technical as I am used to.  This time, however, with the new release of the Leopard, which carries Bootcamp as part of its core to allow running Windows on the Macbook, I hope to have better results.

With the data recovery cost, the extended warranty (after having 2 major laptop problems in less than 2 years, I was inclined to get it), the data extraction fee at a discount, my tab at Futureshop came to almost $3,000 today.

It was a painful two days being without my data or a laptop. Right now I am writing this post on my shiny new Macbook Pro 15.4 with the 2.2 ghz Intel Duo Core and 2Gb of RAM, along with an N-class wireless adapter, topped off by an illuminated keyboard underneath the glossy LED screen.

Wish me luck.

My laptop is not booting up properly and after trying everything I could imagine - attempt to boot it under safe mode, attempt to use ERD Commander for recovery, etc., I gave up and it’s now in the London Drugs computer department to have its data extracted. Once the data is extracted I will be restoring the laptop to factory condition and start over again. But this is a major pain in the ass, honestly.

I am currently able to use only my Windows XP machine which sits at my desk and never leaves (despite the fact that it is a laptop, it has a dead screen, so it’s hooked up to an external monitor). This is the machine that I use for programming of John Chow’s TTZ Media Adserver/Catalog project, so at least I will be getting some work done. Hopefully by tomorrow they will have my laptop data restored, and by tomorrow night I will have full access of my regular machine again.