One thing I am taking away from my technological years as an IT consultant is that I know how to set an efficient work platform for any businesses.  My system works and is reliable.

One thing I am acutely aware of is as a business we cannot afford to be worried about our computer systems or stress over it.  4 years ago when I decided to bite the bullet and buy my first, and to this day still only Apple laptop, I knew I wanted something much more robust than what Microsoft and PC makers had to offer.  It was a gamble and it paid off exponentially in 4 years of no upgrades.  I have had no reasons, except that Leopard really makes sense…

To this day I have no anti-virus I actually use.  My laptop rarely, if ever "crashes" and least less than once every two months.  I never reboot sve for the rare important update that forces me.  I also made sure I was amply backed up.  That meant getting at least two external hard drives to back up my data onto.  I have a 1tb disk that stores everything, a 500gb for miscellaneous data and a 250 that backs up daily.

If you have Leopard, than you will be doubly happy.  I hear Time Machine works wonders, literally.  It backs up automatically, seamlessly and restoring is child work, everything is viewed in coherent visual folder views, backup by backup.  Plus Tiger and Leopard users can free themselves from many mouse clicks by using the Spotlight feature with the keyboard. Frankly, Apple is a brainless choice for small buisinesses.  Go and google Tom Yager.

Yes, I am vocal about Apple products because they are very streamlined.  If you only have one platform to work with, you make it work very well.  This is something Windows cannot do because it has to be accommodated to so many different configurations. Apple only has a few and they all work very well.

Planning a computer system that works, is efficient and why not, has eye candy made sense to me.  Ultimately, I paid little for my laptop.  It was $1300 dollars and that was 4 years ago.  How many PC laptops can boast this?  If I decide to install Leopard (2 generations from what my laptops came with) it will not slow it down but make it even more efficient.  Again, what PC can boast this with Windows?  Stability of Mac OSX?  Unix, need I say more?  And remember to give yourself ample extra storage place for your backups.  Don't learn the hard way.  Security and backups are easy, take a little investment and save a lot of work.