Blatant Plug: We have just launched a brand new course at PCMech University which is designed to give you tactics you need to know on how to take professional photographs using any standard digital camera. No, you don’t need the expensive model to make good images. The secret is in the person holding the camera, not the equipment (in most cases). Come by PCMech University for more information.

But, that’s not the purpose of this article. I promise. Let’s say you are taking some cool shots with your camera. What can you do with them besides impress yourself?

Go Quasi-Pro Online

Anybody who is a hobbyist photographer would love to make some money doing what they love - namely taking pictures. The Internet makes it much easier to do.

In the old days, you would need to make the right contacts and even strike up a deal with an agency. You’d have to send in your negatives and get approved, yada yada. Today, stock photography sites are online. And with photography being mostly digital today, you can now simply upload your photos.

One such site is iStockPhoto. iStockPhoto is a large online marketplace for stock photography. Anybody looking to buy a photo for use on the web or in print advertising, for instance, can come to this site and buy rights to use a photo. That is what stock photography is all about. As a photographer, you can submit your photos to iStockPhoto and earn money if anybody purchases your work. Pay rates usually hover around 20% of the purchase price. You can set the purchase price yourself (ranging from $1 up to $40).

Now, to keep the quality of the collection up, yes you do need to get approval from Istockphoto before you can participate. They will check the quality of the work as well as any possible copyright issues and appropriate model releases (if there are people in your photo).

Other sites you can check out are ShutterStock (pays 25 cents per purchase, which can add up if you keep things fresh) ShutterPoint, Fotolia (between 30 cents and $1 per download) and Dreamstime (pays between 50% and 80% commission).

Some Tips

As I end off this article, here is some quick advice if you want to start making money doing this:

1. Takes LOTS of pictures. As any photographer will tell you, you snap snap snap to end up with a few good ones.
2. Pay attention to what sells and take those kinds of photos. Feed the demand.

If you take it seriously, then yes, you can make money with your digital camera. It doesn’t have to be a full-time job, either. It could be a spare time thing and still work out in your favor.

Now, Kyle’s service allows people with little to no experience editing their own website to make edits to their website. His audience is made up of people who own and run their own sites, so in this interview I am giving some inside knowledge on how I have managed to build up PCMech to the point that it is today.

Call it a little shop talk, but I would venture to say that anybody interested in bringing some traffic to their own site might be interested in watching this video. So, here it is:

This interview was outside, so both Kyle and I apologize for the audio. A few times the wind does get in the way. Oh well.

To summarize my primary points, it really does come down to the basics.

1. Give things away for free. People want value. What put PCMech on the map was providing a lot of content and making it freely available. A well known internet marketer named Eban Pagan talks about “moving the free line”, and the idea behind it is to give away a lot of value on your site. You can, of course, charge for more premium content (which we do here at PCMech University), but if people like what you do for free, they will like what you charge them for.
2. Post often. PCMech is a blog, and the success of any blog comes down to posting a lot. You notice that we try to post 3-4 times per day if we can.
3. Don’t shy away from opinion. Have personality, state your opinion and don’t shy away from controversy. Controversy can and does drive traffic. You can see any of my Mac versus PC editorials to see that is true (and many times that was an accident).
4. Write about what people are searching for and put those search keywords into your article as well as your article’s title.
5. Ask them to Subscribe. If you want people to subscribe to your mailing list, ask them!

It comes down to the basics. There is not really a “trick” to getting traffic. It comes down to doing the basics and doing it a lot.

When you click on that button, you see a system whereby you can “rat out” an employer using pirated software and do so anonymously. Now, a one million dollar payday would, of course, be limited to people who expose a really big case. But, a recent news release by BSA says they are expanding that program and that they have awarded $58,000 to 14 people who provided credible reports of piracy.

As a small business owner, I used to get mail threats from these people several years ago. Even though I use all licensed software, it is still a bit of a punch in the nuts to get that kind of threat. The campaign they put on is specifically designed to scare the crap out of you.

The BSA also likes to target small businesses. They say it is because small business are most likely to use pirated software. That is likely true. At the same time, however, small businesses are also more likely to fold and settle. They respond to bullying much easier because they cannot afford the legal fight. It makes for an easier target.

If you think the RIAA is annoying and that the music industry is going after its customers, the BSA makes the RIAA look like a cakewalk.

Check out this slideshow at Baseline which outlines 12 companies that were nabbed by BSA.

How To Avoid It

Obviously, your best bet is to avoid the fight in the first place. How? Use licensed software and be able to prove it.

1. Save your receipts. When you buy software, keep the receipt. If the receipt was emailed, print it and file it away.
2. Do a Software Audit. Businesses should be aware of all the software running on it’s computers and be able to correlate any installation to a specific serial number.
3. Use a Software Monitoring Tool. If you have others on your business network using computers, it might be a good idea to have some monitoring in place to see what people are installing. Spiceworks is one such application.
4. Have a Clear Policy. You should have a policy in place for your employees about the use of unlicensed software. The policy should, of course, forbid it’s use as well as provide policy on how to go about submitting a request to purchase software.
5. Don’t Buy From Shady Suppliers. Don’t buy your software from some unknown supplier in China and expect it to be valid. It probably won’t be. Also, be wary of buying software on Ebay. Pay close attention to the license information.

How To Get Legal Once The Deed Is Done

If your business already has unlicensed software in use, you need to rectify it. Obviously, this entails uninstalling all illegal software and purchasing licenses to the software you need. Even if the software is rarely or never used, if it is installed to your computer and it is unlicensed, you should remove it.

Buying licenses to all the software you need might be expensive, especially if you’ve been particularly wonton about your use of licensed software in the past. Some advice:

1. Go open source. Many times, there are free ways to get the same job done. For instance, if you are running an unlicensed version of Microsoft Office, you can remove it and go to OpenOffice instead. It works with Office document formats and is free.
2. Consider old versions. Many times, you can buy older versions of software at a much cheaper price. And often the old version would work just fine.

It Just Makes Sense

I know there are a lot of people out there who use unlicensed software. The temptation to use something for free is attractive. I’ve been using computers for years, and yes, I have used unlicensed software. But, some time ago I made the expressed decision to stop doing that. I slowly but surely purchased licenses to everything. Today, I am on the Mac which is a completely different platform. I do not have a single unlicensed application on this machine. I either use free software, pony up when needed, or don’t use it.

As a business owner, it just makes sense to force such a policy. You cannot have people using company equipment with illegal software on it. The potential drawbacks to that can be huge, and you have groups like BSA out there to ensure that they are.

Not to mention that, if you’re in business, you want to make money. You probably wouldn’t want other people being able to use your product without paying for it, right? So, why try to make money for yourself while simultaneously stealing from the companies which make the software you use?

Makes no sense.

What Good is it When the RSS Method is Better?

Have you ever tried to put together a blog for family, and highly doubted the fact that they’d want to go download something or set up an independent account just to stay in touch? Have you noticed that you have very few subscriptions, and want a possible avenue to increase them? You see, the RSS system is very efficient, but you need to understand that not everyone wants an RSS reader. It means learning new things, and that means extra time. Make things easy on your potential readership, and give them the choice. I, even knowing the power of the feed and reader, still prefer to receive emails about updates. Without any additional work, they get an email every time you post. Keep these things in mind.

Where to Find It

If you’ve read this far and know what I am talking about, you are probably familiar with  Feedburner. This is a popular place to go and get your hands on some subscription buttons and track site activity, so it should come as no surprise that they do email subscriptions as well. You’ll need an account with them to set it all up, if you don’t already have one. Once you are set up and ready to go, get yourself into the “My Feeds” section of the website (the link is in the upper left section). During your registration, you should have already set up a feed, but if you haven’t, just enter the blog URL into the box, activate it. Keep clicking through the options, selecting what you want and don’t want, and you’ll eventually get to a page titled “Your feed is ready for the world. Now what?” You need to click on the tab labeled “Publicize”, and then on “Subscriptions”, under “Services”. Congratulations! You are about to enable your very own email service!

What To Do

You have your option to choose a few different services to send out your email. I chose the default of Feedburner, just to keep it simple. Next, click on “Activate”, near the bottom of the page, and you’ll be brought to a management section. Here, you can choose whether you want a link, which will bring potential subscribers to a new page, or a form, which allows them to simply enter an email address and click a button. It is mostly a matter of preference, but there are benefits to each method. A link saves space on pages with lots of content or extra HTML blocks, but can be more difficult to find in that same environment. Alternatively, a form takes up more space, is easier to find and saves the reader the time of going to an extra page.

If you are a lucky owner of a page with Blogger or TypePad, you can simply go to the drop down menu underneath the code box and install it as a widget. Otherwise, you’ll have to copy and paste the code into an independent HTML block on your page. The exact means by which to do this are different for each blog service provider, but the general idea is the same.  Get to your page layout editor, add or modify an HTML block, and paste the provided code into said block. Save the changes, preview your blog, and voila! You have just enabled your readers to keep tabs on you.

Afterthoughts

If this is the first time you’ve set up a service like this on your blog, there are some things you need to remember. If it is only a certain few people who should be allowed to subscribe, you need to keep track of your list. Make sure that people who shouldn’t be on there, aren’t. Just politely tell them your reasoning, and point them to the appropriate link at the bottom of your email. On the other hand, if someone asks to be unsubscribed, you need to show them to the ‘unsubscribe link’ in your emails. Lastly, since you have subscribers, your are now more obligated than before to post at least semi-regularly, lest your fans get bored and decide to unsubscribe. The purpose of this is to keep people up to date, so make sure there is something to read!

So now you’re all set to go. Don’t forget to check out the other tools that Feedburner gives you, like traffic analysis, podcasting, and rotating headlines. Have fun with it all, and happy blogging!

Google’s blog post describes the service quite well:

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving you more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.

This is a poke in the eye of Amazon. Amazon Web Services is also a platform for developers to run their web applications. Amazon offers S3 (for mass storage), EC2 (for virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database). So, Google App Engine is basically taking on Amazon. But, as Techcrunch is reporting, the Amazon package is more loosely coupled than the Google setup. Amazon allows developers to pick and choose what they need whereas the Google setup is pretty much all-or-nothing. In other words, Google App Engine is designed for people who want to run their apps entirely on Google.

Profy.com says that Google has “jumped the shark“, though. While Google is offering free service up to a certain point (500 MB storage, 10 GB bandwidth daily), Profy points out that Google made a mistake by using Python as the programming language rather than Ruby. They also point out that this is just another “me too” move by Google. They saw Amazon making money and decided to try to “one up” them and give some of it away for free (in classic Google style).

So, has Google really jumped the shark? Is Google App Engine really the next big thing, or is this just another temporary excitement designed to get bloggers excited over nothing?

I can tell you one thing Profy is right on: Python? Yuck. Google, for their part, says they will soon be supporting other languages, but I wouldn’t be interested in this until I see some Ruby or PHP support.

Well, Craigslist has launched a blog.

The blog is, well, ugly as sin. It has that usual Craigslist look and feel - you know, the kind of 90’s web design that could have been done (almost) by my computer newbie wife. They don’t even offer an RSS feed. That, right there, makes this thing to where it is hardly even a real blog. The posts are in chronological order, making it a real blog. But, not having an RSS feed is naive.

It is almost as if they decided to be contrarian and program their own blog rather than use the infinitely more powerful (and free) Wordpress software.

I guess Craigslist likes to run minimalist blogs, similar to that of Dave Winer.

As Craigslist launches their sorta-kinda blog, they have decided to go after the unofficial Craigslist blog, run by Tim White This blog is much better than Craigslist’s official blog, but Craigslist CEO sent them a C&D letter which was posted to the web:

Tim,

We need you to stop using the infringing domain CRAIGSLISTBLOG.ORG immediately, and arrange for tranfer of it to us asap - using/selling/transfering infringing domains is illegal, and penalties up to $100,000 per domain can be applied.

Regardless of your efforts to find a new domain, you must stop using this one.

Tim then responded to Craigslist with:

Jim,

Thanks for your message. I think you have received bad legal counsel and that this is potentially a really bad PR move for cl. We will make some modifications to our “Best of” section to not include any of your content; just our take and a link to the actual post.

Are you going to ask these folks to shut down their websites, too?

http://craigscrimelist.org

http://www.craigslistmap.info/

http://crazedlist.org/

et al…

Regards,
Tim White

Personally, I think the letters from Craigslist seem REALLY unprofessional. Typos (assuming Tim indeed posted them unaltered) and really, really rude. The unofficial blog is great promotion for Craigslist. I can clearly see that the legal potential for name confusion is real, but I can imagine that there should be MUCH more constructive ways of dealing with the situation than the Craigslist CEO sending childish threatening letters.

Tim, the name you chose definitely puts you in legal hot water. But, Craigslist is ignoring an opportunity by going after one of their evangelists.

I don’t know if Tim can withstand the legal onslaught of Craigslist, but this kind of bullying is sure to piss off a lot of the internet’s rank and file. And deservedly so.

Sound familiar?

In this day and age, information overload is not only common, it is practically the rule of existence. The problem is that it can get in the way. It can lead to mental confusion. It can lead to wheel spinning. It can lead to that feeling that you’ve been BUSY all day, but nothing really got done.

It is important that people develop skills in dealing with information. Develop a system whereby you can handle all the incoming data being thrown at you. Better yet, you may decide that some of that data is completely useless to you and simply turn it off.

Here are some simple tips to help you keep your head from exploding. Doing this will be a lot eaiser than picking up the bloody pieces of your brain off the floor (nice visual, I know)..

1. Don’t let email rule your life. I suggest you set aside certain times of the day to handle your email. Perhaps for one hour in the morning. Or perhaps you might schedule one check in the morning and one in the afternoon. Either way, the idea is to limit time spent in your email client. And, for god sakes, CLOSE the email client when not in these times. Resist the urge to check incoming messages at random times during the day. It simply distracts you from real work. Also, get rid of any notifiers of new email. You don’t want anything popping up from your taskbar to tell you you have new email.
2. Use RSS, But Do So Strategically. RSS is a great invention. It allows you to monitor a bunch of websites (usually blogs) from one place without the need to go and check on those sites individually. Good idea, except that it can lead to even more noise and information overload. So, if you are going to use RSS, be sure to only keep the feeds in there that you actually value. You don’t need to be subscribed to every blog under the sun. It gets you nowhere.
3. Empty And Organize The Inbox. Back to the subject of email, a lot of people end up using their email inbox as a repository for crap we don’t want to do right now or haven’t gotten around to. This means that when you look at your inbox, it is a long unwieldy list of C-R-A-P. The answer to this is twofold: (1) Create folders and labels (if using Gmail) to organize your email by types, (2) Use your inbox only for staging. When an email arrives, you evaluate it. If you can handle it in just a few minutes, do it right then. If not, file it away in the proper folder and get it out of your inbox. Each time you check your email, then, the end product is an empty inbox.
4. Use a paper inbox, too. It is great to have your email come into an inbox. But, what about all those paper particles? You should treat them the same way. Put a 3-box stacking system on your desk: IN, PENDING and OUT. Then, ALL particles that come in should go to your inbox. When you sit down to handle your communication, you deal with each item in your inbox and empty it. Learn to treat these papers the same way you do your email. Don’t have them sitting around all over you desk as that only contributes to the information overload.
5. Control Your Phone. When you’re working, you don’t need any distraction. With email and papers, you can control the timing. However, phone calls come in at random times and you have no record of it. It is insanity. The way you control that is to let all incoming phone calls go straight to voice mail (and turn your ringer off so the calls don’t distract you). Then, you handle all voice mails the same way you deal with your email - at scheduled times. In fact, if you use VOIP then you may even have your voice mails sent right to your email inbox which is even better.
6. Use an auto-responder and voice mail message to inform others. Some people expect to have their messages returned right away. Great for them, extremely inconvenient for you getting any work done. So, use an auto-responder on your email to inform them that there will be a delay and that you return messages only at certain times. Also, you can change your voice mail message to tell them the same.
7. Turn off Twitter. A lot of bloggers and social media types (including myself) make use of Twitter. But, realize that it only adds to the information overload. So, I’m not saying you need to stop using Twitter completely if you enjoy it, but you might try just turning off your Twitter client (or no checking the website) when you’re working. Again, you’re trying to minimize distraction and incoming tweets is nothing but that. Knowing some dude is going out for pizza is completely useless knowledge when it comes to your production.
8. Stop reading the news. Seriously. Its fine to check up on it every now and then, but reading DrudgeReport 10 times per day does nothing but suck your time and put more bulls*it bad news into your already saturated head.
9. When possible, automate. Data backup is important, but put it on automatic. Automate your virus scans. Automate email organization using filtering.
10. Have balance in your life. When I had my daughter a few months ago, I realized more then ever how important it is to have balance. Don’t spend ALL the time on the computer. Family is important. YOU are important and sometimes it is better for you to go exercise or simply veg out and watch TV for an hour. You need a little time off sometimes, and the Internet is not going anywhere.

Some of these tips are an acquired art. At first, you may feel fits of withdrawal not being part of the Twitter conversation at all times, or not getting that email the very second it arrives. But, you’ll probably accomplish a lot more.

Bloggers, especially, may find this stuff hard to do. Our jobs DEPEND on being part of the social framework on the Internet. I understand and I have the same problem. But, at the very least, when you’ve got work to do, give these things a try.

Your to-do list ill thank you.

A NAS device, in simple English, is a disk drive that is attached to your network instead of to a specific computer. Because it is attached to the network, you can access the data on it from any computer on the network.

You can get two kinds of NAS gadgets:

1. A controller with one or more empty drive bays to which you can attached any internal IDE disk drive
2. An all encompassing device with one or more disk drives built-in.

The two are not much different. In the fist instance, you have to do the work of attaching a drive to the controller yourself while in the second instance the manufacturer does the work for you. Buy one which you are comfortable with.

NAS devices usually come with their own operating system, mostly some flavor of Linux. Therefore, they can work with PCs, Macs, and even Linux computers. Installing them is quite simple. You take them out of the box and attach drives, if necessary. Then you connect them to a hub, switch, or router on your network by means of an Ethernet cable. That’s it. The device appears under your network in My Network Places.

But you might not be able use it as yet. Some devices are preconfigured for use with Windows computers and their drives are formatted in FAT or FAT32 format. They even have a default share. If you purchase such a device, you are in business right away. You must configure others before you can use them.

Configuring these devices is quite easy. They have a browser-based management interface very similar to that of a router. You type the URL provided in the device’s manual in your browser’s address to bring up the management interface just as you do with a router. You can do the following in the management interface:

1. Format the drive
2. Create folders and share them
3. Create user accounts
4. Grant users access to the shared folders

The process of formatting the drive and creating folders is basically the same as it is on your computer. But you must check the device’s manual before doing so. With some NAS devices, you can’t format the drive in NTFS format if you want to write to it; you must use the FAT or FAT 32 formats. And some devices don’t support long folder names — you must restrict folder names to the 8.3 format (8 character filenames). Read the manual and format the drive accordingly. Then create folders on it depending on the supported naming convention and enable sharing on them. If you want the data on the network to be accessible to everyone on the network, you don’t need to do much else, but if you want to restrict the access to only certain users, you must configure folder access rules.

The first step is to create user IDs from the device’s management interface. The trick is to create the same user ID and password for a use as the one he has on his computer. Windows has a built-in feature called pass-through authentication which automatically manages the access. It passes the user ID and password to the device, which uses it to authenticate the user. But be careful. Some devices only support eight character passwords. If yours is one of them, and your users have longer passwords, you will have to reduce the length of the user’s passwords on their computers to eight characters or less for pass-through authentication to work.

The next step is to grant access to the shared folders to the user accounts you just created. This process is exactly the same as sharing a folder on your computer with another user. So you won’t have much trouble with it.

Finally you map the shared folders as drives on the user’s computers. Everyone can now use these shared folders as if they were on their own computers.

"Why go through all this trouble", you ask? First, you don’t have to leave all your computers on simply for other people to access shared folders on them. But the biggest reason is that you can streamline your backup process. If you leave your applications on your computers but move the data to the NAS device, you only have to back up a few folders in a single location instead of backing up several folders on several computers.

In fact, most of these devices come with a USB port at the back, to which you can attach a regular external hard drive. (Make sure the capacity of the external drive is equal to or greater than the NAS drive.) The devices also come with automatic backup software. All you have to do to schedule automatic backups is select the folders to back up and set a time to start the back up. Both the settings can be set from the device’s management interface.

As a bonus, most NAS devices come with a built-in print server. Recall from the first part of this article that you can connect desktop printers to a network with the help of a print server. If you buy a NAS device, you don’t have to buy a separate print server; you can simply use the built-in one. But keep in mind that some features of AIOs won’t work with print servers.

Believe it or not, this is an incredibly simple and elegant storage, backup, and printer sharing solution for workgroups– you don’t have to mess with tapes and writable CDs or DVDs. And it is an inexpensive one too. NAS devices are not expensive. I recently bought 500GB device at Buy.com for under $150. For under $250, including the cost of an external USB drive, you can share all your data, back it up automatically, and even share your old desktop printer. Now that’s what I call an irresistible deal!

Then came the broadband revolution. All of a sudden broadband service providers started throwing in a little box called a router with their package. These routers usually had four Ethernet ports on the back. You didn’t have to worry about setting up ICS any more. You simply had to put a network card in each of your computers and connect them to the router using a cable with a phone-jack-on-steroids at each end. That’s it. The router took care of everything.

Most people associate a router with a shared Internet connection. But what many fail to realize is that a router can do much more than simply connecting them to the Internet. It can act as the cornerstone of a network that has not only computers attached to it but other devices as well. In fact, you can now get all sorts of gadgets that allow you to use your network to its full potential.

The first thing you must know about an Ethernet network is that each device connected to it needs something called an IP address. Think of an IP address as a unique number that identifies that device on the network. In the good old days, you had to assign IP addresses to devices manually. But modern routers have a software program called a DHCP server built into them. The DHCP server automatically assigns an IP address to anything that is connected to the network it is on. That’s why you can simply plug in a cable into the router’s port and everything works just fine.

But a router usually has only four ports. What if you want to connect five computers or devices to it? No problem. That can easily be done. You just have to run to the local CompUSA and get another little box called a hub. A hub looks suspiciously like a router. But it’s not a router. It usually has five or nine (and sometimes more) Ethernet ports on the back. One of those ports is called an uplink port. Some smart hubs don’t have a designated uplink port - you can use any port as an uplink port. You connect the uplink port of a hub to a port on the router by means of an Ethernet cable. Then you can use the remaining ports on the hub as if they were on a router. In effect, a hub adds ports to your network which you can use to add more computers or devices. You can add a hub anywhere on your network. You can even chain hubs to create more ports. Hubs, in effect, allow you to expand your network.

One problem with hubs is that they are slow. That’s so because data flows through them only in one direction at a time. They are like roads under construction where a guy, wearing an orange vest and a Stop/Go sign in his hand, allows traffic in either direction to pass alternately. Better substitutes for hubs are devices called switches. Switches are just like hubs, but they allow data to flow in both directions simultaneously. Naturally they are a little more expensive than hubs.

Okay, now you know how to expand your network. But what will you do with all those ports? As it happens, you can connect all sorts of gadgets to them.

To begin with, you can share printers. "Big deal!" you might say, "I already share my printer from Windows." The problem with that scheme, however, is that the computer to which the printer is attached must be powered on for the Windows share to work. A network attached printer doesn’t have that restriction. As long as the printer itself is powered on, you can print to it from any computer on the network.

So how do you connect a printer to the network? Just as you connect a computer to the network. With an Ethernet cable. But to do so, your printer must have an Ethernet port. Such printers are called network printers. They are not expensive. They cost roughly the same as regular printers. Recently I bought a Brother network printer on sale at Staples for $79.

Once a printer is on the network, you will be able to see it in the Add Printer dialog from all your computers. Just add it as you would a regular printer and you can print to it.

But what if you already have a desktop printer? Again, no problem. You must get another gadget called an Ethernet print server. These gadgets have an Ethernet port and one or more USB or parallel ports. You connect the print server to a router, a hub, or a switch with, you guessed it, an Ethernet cable. Then you connect your desktop printer to the USB port on the print server. As you can see, it’s pretty easy to transform your desktop printer into a network printer.

Once you attach all printers at home or in your home office to the network, printing becomes incredibly simple. No more frantic trips to Staples to get ink or copying files to the floppy to take them to another computer for printing.

Before you trot along to buy a print server, keep in mind that print servers may not work with really old printers. If you have a parallel printer, you are better of throwing it and buying a network printer. Print servers also don’t work with All-In-One (AIO) printers. Some AIOs can print if they are connected to print servers, but you won’t be able to fax or scan with them over the network.

However, you can buy network AIO printers that will allow you to use the fax and scan features from any computer on the network. Of course, you will need to install the software that came with your printer on every computer you want to scan and fax from. Check out Brother’s AIOs if you are interested in these features.

Like printers, you can share disk drives over the network as well. Again, these drives are not a computer’s internal disk drives external USB drives attached to it. They are free-standing disk drives attached to the network with an Ethernet cable which are accessible to all computers on the network.

I’ll go over network-attached drives and a few more gadgets in next week’s column (Part 2).  Until then, happy printing!

These days, most broadband service providers throw in a router with a new connection. Typically it has four slots on the back, which means that you can connect up to four computers to the Internet simultaneously without adding any other hardware. Once you connect a second computer to the router, you have a little network of your own. The next logical step for most people is to plug in a network-enabled printer into the router so that they can print to it from any of the computers on the network.

This kind of network is called a peer-to-peer network because all computers on it are peers — none of them is more important than the others. Unfortunately, that’s where many small networks stop growing in functionality. Few progress beyond sharing an Internet connection and a printer. But there is a lot more that you can do with a network.

It is possible to access data on a computer on a peer-to-peer network from any other computer on the network. This opens up many possibilities. You can back up important data on to the hard disk of another computer, for example, to protect it from disk crashes.

To share data between computers, you must take two steps:

1. Make a folder sharable
2. Grant access to the shared folder to others

The first step is easy enough. Bring up the properties of the folder of the drive in Windows Explorer, Click on the Sharing tab, and choose Share this folder option.

Granting access to others is a bit tricky. If you want Joe to share a folder on your computer, Joe must have an account on your computer as well. Once you create one for him, he can see the shared folder in My Network Places on his computer. When he clicks on it, your computer will ask him for a password, because it doesn’t know that Joe is the same Joe who has an account on your computer. Joe can then enter his user ID and password to authenticate himself with your computer. After he is authenticated, he can use the folder on your computer as if it were on his own computer.

The authentication can be seamless if you use a feature of Windows called pass-through authentication. The trick is to have an account for Joe on your computer as well as on his own computer with identical user ID/password combination. If this condition is met, Windows on his computer passes on his authentication information to Windows on your computer when Joe clicks on the shared folder. Your computer verifies it and allows Joe to access the folder without popping up an authentication dialog.

Sharing data this way is better than not being able to share it at all but this scheme of things has a couple of problems:

1. Your computer must be powered on when Joe wants to access the shared folder
2. Every time Joe changes his password on his computer, he must remember to change it on yours as well.

"Big deal" you might say, "We can easily manage that." And you would be right. But only as long as you and Joe are the only people sharing data on your network and you share a single folder. If you have ten people, ten computers, and forty shared folders, you will rack up dollars on your electricity bill and Joe will have to spend all his day changing passwords.

Wouldn’t it be great if all the authentication information could be stored in a single place away from all your computers so that Joe can do some useful work instead of changing his password three hundred times? And why not have the shared folders in the same location as the authentication information so that you won’t have to leave all your computers running all the time?

Such a solution does exist. It’s called a server. A server is a special computer which fulfils requests from other computers. Once you add a server to your network and entrust the responsibility of authentication to it, your network is transformed from a peer-to-peer network in to a client/server network.

A server merely provides a service when asked. Severs can provide different kinds of services. Large networks typically have many servers. Each server is usually dedicated to providing a single service. Those that provide file-sharing facilities are called file servers. Those that server Web pages are called Web servers, and those that provide authentication services are called Domain Controllers. There are many more. In smaller networks, typically found in home or small-business environments, a single physical server performs several of these duties.

Servers need special operating systems which are optimized for providing services as opposed to serving a single user interactively. They are much more difficult to install and configure than installing Windows on a desktop.

If you are technically challenged, you will probably need professional services for installing a server and setting up a network around it. If, on the other hand, you consider yourself a power user, you may be able to install a server yourself using an easy-to-install server operating system such as Windows Small Business Server 2003.

Windows Small Business Server 2003 performs several duties, which includes:

• Authentication
• Internet security
• Serving database queries
• Hosting of a Web server
• Hosting of an e-mail server
• File sharing services

Not every small business needs a server, but if you find that you and your co-workers are spending a good bit of time locating and exchanging documents, a server may just be what the doctor ordered.