My top IT lessons so far
This year has been the year of information technology learning experiences. My web site has undergone a major upgrade (which is still not live!), I bought a new cell phone (a Blackberry, which I love), and one of our office computers suffered a major meltdown complements of McAffee. Here are lessons a non geek doctor has learned (so far!) from the wonderful world of information technology:
- Pick two of three: good, cheap or fast. I am trying to get an online reservation system built for my website (www.extramd.com) so our clients can request physician coverage on line. We started the project in January, with the idea it would be running by the end of February. It’s still not fully operational. The person I have doing it is good and cheap, but not fast. I’m a small business owner, and I trully believe you can only afford two of the three. I elected for for cheap and good, but I don’t know if this was the right choice.
- Don’t listen to teenage salesman when it comes to cell phones. Last December, I listened to a youngster at the phone store, bought in to the hype and bought a Droid phone. What a mistake. Nothing on it that was actually useful. It had all sorts of “aps” you could put on the empty phone, but after I calculated the cost of loading up the phone so it was actually usable, I turned it in for a Blackberry. Love the Blackberry, hated the Droid.
- Antivirus programs aren’t that good, especially when they are the cause of a computer crash. Last month, the main computer my company runs on crashed because of McAffee, the anti viral software the “protects” my computers. McAffee had just released a new upgrade, and down went the computer. After two days of trying to fix it, I took it to the computer doctor, who told me the upgrade crashed the computer. I had just paid to renew McAffee on all the computers. McAffee says it will make good on the repair bill, and will let you know when/if I get the check. (My claim is “under review.”)
- Have some sort antiviral protection however. Entrepreneur magazine states that one third of small businesses have no antivirus software!
- Don’t open emails that say “open here for free cash.” I didn’t do this, but believe it or not, this is a prime way small businesses get attacked by viruses. Some poor slob opens that email, and in marches the virus.
- Back up your computer in multiple ways. I like mozy.com which backs my computers up in to the “cloud”, and I also back up on to a flash drive. You will still have to go through the pain of resinstalling everything if you do suffer an attack, but it’s better than nothing! A friend of mine had a disc drive failure and it still took her 40 hours to restore everything!
There are many more mistakes I’m sure I’ll make, but I’ll learn from them! Hope you can learn from mine!!
Tags: Blackberry, Droid, McAfee, website
