Don’t get caught out in the field without the tools you need. A USB stick equipped with a few essential apps might just save the day. Ah, the USB stick — one of the IT admin’s best friends. It travels with you and helps you rescue machines, work magic, and make end users sigh with relief. Some of these apps you copy to the hard drive and install; others can be run from the stick itself. A few of them…
Takeaway: Keep your Windows machines optimized and healthy with the help of these five tools. The PC is the single greatest tool for getting your work done. And out of the box, that PC works great. But over time, it can become bogged down and buggy. Fragmentation, hard-disk issues, bad memory, viruses, filled caches, and registry errors can cause computers to act flaky or even stop working all together. This doesn’t have to be the case. With a bit of…
Takeaway: You don’t have to turn to proprietary software to get your work done. Here are five feature-rich open source alternatives. What do we need to produce our work? Although it has changed over the years — with the browser becoming probably the most important productivity tool we now have — certain constants remain. We must produce documents, we must be able to create/manipulate images, we must manage money, and we must be able to communicate and schedule. These constants…
Takeaway: Jitsi lets you audio and video conference on your terms using your own private SIP server or any SIP service. Clearly, Skype is the world’s most popular voice and video chat client and it supports a wide variety of platforms. But if you are looking for an alternative that affords you privacy and more control, Jitsi is the answer. Touted by security conscious netizens like the Tor Project’s own Jacob Appelbaum as an ideal alternative to proprietary software like…