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Message from the COO

My Early Christmas Present (and you can have one too)!

You know those stories of something amazing that happened to you and you just have to share it with everyone so it can happen for them too? Well this is one of those stories!

So there I was working along on my laptop, typing away as always when suddenly my computer starts to act up. I reboot and the system identifies a most dreadful scenario - bad sectors on my hard disk. There was no warning, no fancy message, no indication whatsoever. In fact, I dare say I took my laptop's reliability for granted. It just happened - just like that - I had a crisis on my hands.

In spite of the fact I have been in IT nearly my whole career, panic sets in. I think to myself, what if it doesn't come back on? When did I last do a backup? How much work or even worse, business (yikes) will I lose as a result? Now don't make fun of me because if you thought about it long and hard for a second, you would have the same reaction. Losing everything on your computer is worse than losing your wallet. A few bucks and cancelling some credit cards is nothing compared to trying to reconstruct what might be years of professional history, proposals, business contacts, email, and the like. Just consider what would happen to you in that case. . . just for a second.

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The total number of users on the social networking site Facebook has now soared above the 200 million mark. Just to put that into perspective: if Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth largest on Earth, after China, India, the U.S. and Indonesia. According to a recent report by ComScore, the number of European Facebook subscribers has grown by 314% over the past year to nearly 100 million users.

Due to the site's popularity, many organizations (including HP) have recognized Facebook's value in promoting their products and services. And everyone from British actor Stephen Fry to President Barack Obama has a Facebook page. Unfortunately, many of the aspects that make Facebook and other social networking sites so popular also make them a prime hunting ground for identity thieves, online scam artists and criminals.

However, there are a few measures you can and should take to protect yourself.

Portables: Everybody wants one. But with portables come issues--issues of weight, inadequate runtimes and the trauma that data can experience when the floor breaks a portable's fall. As if those problems weren't enough, new notebooks will be packing extra weight around the middle: Vista and Microsoft Office Suite 2007.

Some claim that a dose of Flash memory is all a portable needs to become a highly functioning member of computing society. Specifically, the latest generation of drives from Samsung and Seagate put 128MB or 256MB of Flash cache in front of your portable's platters so they don't have to spin up as often to feed the processor. In fact, Samsung's MH80 drive remains idle 99 percent of the time, says Andy Higginbotham, director of hard disk drive marketing at Samsung.

This greatly reduces wear and tear as well as the drive's vulnerability to sudden stops. MH80's idle platters draw 70 percent to 90 percent less power than a traditional drive and generate less heat, he adds, letting your notebook get by with a smaller, cooler-running power plant.

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