Are You Living in the 'Lap' of Luxury?

Article Tools

• September 2008 Issue
• Post a Comment
• Print This Article
• Email This Article to a Friend
• Save This Article
• Order a Reprint

Mobility comes with a price — make sure you have insurance.

From the Sept. 2008 Issue

Have you ever received that “blank screen” stare back from your trusty laptop? You know, the one where no images appear and your heart seems to momentarily stop at the thought that the laptop might not come back on. So you reboot and, if you’re lucky, you’re right back at it. If you’re not so lucky, you’ve got plenty of company. Ask any long-time laptop user about their unique war story from the time their laptop died.

One Company’s Laptop Best Practices Plan
For Huntsville, Alabama executive John B., laptop failure came two days before a big presentation out of town. His laptop was always at his side as he traveled the country. The presentation was loaded on it and ready to go. When it died, John didn’t panic; he remained calm. It was exactly the event he and his company had anticipated in their “Laptop Best Practices” plan. Although not a large company, they found their plan easy to execute.

Step 1: Call back to the office. It didn’t take long for John’s IT resource to pronounce the hard drive dead. “Not to worry,” said IT. “All your data is backed up according to plan, so we can get you back up and running quickly.”

Step 2: Order and overnight a new hard drive to John in the field or find one locally for John to pick up.

Step 3: With new hard drive in hand, reload software and set up. (Ah, Step 3, the key to Laptop Best Practices and good mental health.)

Reloading Software & Reconfiguring the Workstation
When replacing a hard drive, the most time-consuming part of the process is reloading the software and reconfiguring the workstation. IT will piece things together the best they can if there is no organized backup process, but often something is forgotten or not restored. More time is invested, and the hapless laptop owner’s stress level continues to rise. John’s company had a better solution. For those like John who had upgraded to Vista, the answer was to use the built- in Windows Complete PC Backup & Restore tool (available in Vista Business, Ultimate and Enterprise versions).

With a Vista boot disk and his backup data, it was quick to get his new hard drive back up to speed. For those still using XP, the company chose to use “disk imaging software” or “ghosting,” a term made popular by the widely used Norton Ghost software. It makes a ghost image or snapshot of the software and data loaded on a laptop, and when that bad time comes you can quickly restore that original image back to your laptop.

The best ghost image is taken when the laptop has all the standard company programs installed, but before the user starts adding their personal data. IT can quickly restore the ghost image to a laptop. So when there is a problem, Ghost gives a big return on investment. Programs like Ghost have grown even more sophisticated with new releases and now include features like backing up to an FTP site for easier off-site management and differential backups.

Restoring Personal Tools & Documents
With the basics back on John’s laptop, the next step was to restore his personal tools and documents, starting with e-mail. In the olden days, before the “Best Practices” plan was put in place, John’s company had individual copies of Microsoft Outlook on each person’s machine. A year ago, they adopted Microsoft Exchange Server to improve the management of their e-mail communications companywide. It opened up communications by giving them access to shared calendars and folders.