1: Outlook comes in various configurations and flavors

Users should know that they might encounter different features as they move from one machine to another. For instance, when using Outlook or Outlook Web Access at home or offsite, they might be confused or frustrated when Exchange-specific features or options aren’t available. In addition, Outlook Express is only a mail client. Knowing the differences isn’t necessary — but knowing there are differences should ward off a few support calls when favorite features aren’t available.

2: It’s all too easy to make embarrassing mistakes

It’s easy to do things wrong, regardless of the email client being used. Perhaps the most common mistake users make is to click Reply All when replying to just the sender. (Fortunately, this isn’t as easy to do by mistake in Outlook 2010.) Good training is the only way to prevent such errors. You can head off other types of mistakes by creating a policy regarding appropriate use of company email. That way, users won’t be confused about what they can and can’t do. The following links should help your users avoid potential disasters and use email more effectively:

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Note: This list is also available as a photo gallery.

1: The PC Decrapifier

Well, it should be pretty clear from the name what The PC Decrapifier does. This zero-install application, shown in Figure A, easily removes the most common pieces of junk that clutter up a new Windows PC. You can run it from a USB drive (great for desktop support technicians), and it has two low-priced purchase plans, one for commercial use and one for individuals.

2: SlimComputer

SlimComputer (Figure B) doesn’t just remove crapware. It also performs basic performance tuning, such as disabling services and reordering startup items. It can remove some of the less intrusive items, too, like links to trial offers. SlimComputer is interesting in that users can give feedback on what applications should be included in the scans, and it uses a cloud-based system to get this crowdsourced data when you run a scan.

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For iPhone users, I’m going to throw you an assist by sharing my top 20 (this is an update of my 2010 iPhone list, and I will update my top Android picks next week). My iPhone picks are all third-party apps that can help you be more productive, streamline regular activities, reduce the number of gadgets in your life, and take advantage of the top benefits that mobile computing has to offer.

1. Dropbox

Dropbox is a great cloud service that automatically syncs a folder of files between multiple computers (Windows, Mac, or Linux). This app extends Dropbox to the iPhone and includes a built-in reader within the app for PDFs, image files, and Microsoft Office files.

2. Evernote

Once you get used to typing on a virtual keyboard (and it honestly took me over a year to do it), then these devices are great for note taking, and Evernote is a great note taking app. It is similar to Dropbox in that it saves data locally but syncs it across all your machines and devices.

3. Due

There are a ton of to-do apps on iPhone but I prefer Due for its simplicity and its audio alerts. However, this is an iPhone-only task list. If you want something that can sync with your PC, Mac, or the Web, then try 2Do or Things.

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Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn’t need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.

Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.

When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.

Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven’t totally disappeared, but there certainly isn’t a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.

That’s because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don’t need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today’s users don’t need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it’s true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It’s still horribly imperfect, but it’s better.

So where does that leave today’s IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

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1: Quality Internet service

If you are working from home, it is obvious that you will need the Internet all day long to do your job. Where a lot of people go wrong on this is by getting cheap Internet service, such as a consumer grade DSL or cable modem line. The problem is, these services are aimed at providing fast downloads, sometimes with a “burst” of bandwidth for a big item. But they have slow upload speeds, no static IP address, and no guarantees of service quality.

Instead, I recommend a business class account. While it is more expensive, the benefits for a home worker are huge. Having a static IP address lets the home office feel more comfortable in opening services to you, for example, and host services yourself if needed. Business class accounts come with bandwidth and technical support response time guarantees, as opposed to the “best effort” you get with consumer accounts. And many times, the bandwidth is segregated from the residential access so your access does not get jumbled up with the mass of BitTorrent, Xbox Live, and Netflix from the house next door.

2: A real phone

Cell phones are great, but when it comes to call quality, nothing can replace a true desk phone. Even if that phone is connected to VOIP, the quality of the call is far superior. You will be on the phone a lot more than you would be if you were in the office, which makes call quality very important. I tried a good cell phone + good Bluetooth headset, and not only were the bills huge (often more than $200 a month), but the call quality was lousy. Now, I have an inexpensive phone, a Vonage account, and a Jabra GN9350 headset (cannot recommend this item enough), and it’s rare to be asked to repeat myself.

3: Company credit card

When you are on your own, you can’t wait for a central purchasing department to buy something and have it shipped to you. And as an IT professional, you will often buy things that cost more than you will feel comfortable paying for out of your own pocket and getting reimbursed for. In addition, there will be times when you’re on the road and need to pay travel costs. Have your employer furnish you with a company credit card, and life will get a lot easier for you.

4: Ergonomic office furniture and layout

I’ve written a number of articles here at TechRepublic about the ergonomic equipment I use, and there is a reason for it. If you thought you spent a lot of time at your desk in an office, just wait. You will spend even more time at the desk when working from home. It’s simple: You no longer need to get up for anything other than a bathroom break or food and drink. The days of going to the server room or a co-worker’s desk to solve a problem are over, and it is not uncommon to discover that you’ve been at your desk for eight to 10 hours without more than a five-minute break. You don’t even leave the house to get lunch most of the time. Being in a chair this long makes ergonomics even more important than they are in an office. Personally, I love the Herman Miller Embody chair and Envelop desk, the Kinesis Advantage keyboard, and Evoluent Vertical Mouse. Find what works for you.

5: Scanner and inexpensive black-and-white laser printer

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1: Vista and Windows 7 require many times more RAM than XP

When people first move from Windows XP to Windows Vista or Windows 7 and bring up a RAM usage meter, they often panic. What they see is something like Figure A.

Wow, that looks scary, doesn’t it? The system is doing just about nothing (1% CPU usage) but needs 8.84 GB of physical RAM to run. Here’s what is really happening.

Starting in Vista, Windows got aggressive about RAM use. The engineers at Microsoft made it pre-allocate RAM and pre-cache commonly used items, even if they were not actually in use. For example, if you use Word a lot, it will keep Word in memory ready to be used. Obviously, this lets it chew up a ton of RAM, and why not? It isn’t like you were using the RAM anyway, and you will eventually be using it, most likely for the purposes Windows is preparing for. Applications start much faster as a result.

2: More RAM is always faster

More RAM is not a guarantee of a faster machine, although more RAM has never hurt. Actually, that isn’t quite true, either! Many times, the bigger RAM runs as a slower bus speed than the smaller RAM chips. So in theory, more RAM can be mildly harmful to performance. More important is the Dual Channel vs. Triple Channel RAM issue. If you have a choice between 12 GB of RAM using Triple Channel, and 16 GB of RAM on Dual Channel, the 12 GB of RAM will be faster, so long as you rarely need to go to the swap file. Also, since Windows does pre-allocate RAM and cache often-used items, having that extra RAM could conceivably make a difference, assuming that you are a huge RAM user.

3: Anti-malware apps kill performance

Yes, anti-malware apps have an effect on performance. And at one time, that effect was massive. Back in the day, many PC slowdown issues could be solved by removing applications like antivirus. In recent years, things have changed.

It used to be that anti-malware apps essentially had to hijack the OS to see what was going on with the file system and RAM, and this was where the slowdown occurred. That is no longer the case. Windows now provides hooks into the OS for anti-malware applications to receive files and sign off on them in a regular fashion. As a result, anti-malware apps still have a performance hit, but it’s very minimal.

4: If you clear the browser history, you’ll gain some speed

On a regular basis, I see advice like this bandied about:

• Delete your browser history to speed things up.
• Clear your cookies for more speed.
• Empty your browser cache to make the Web fly!

Guess what? It’s bunk. The only thing that clearing the history could make faster is the display of suggestions from your browser (which quietly pares the list as needed for performance anyway).

Dumping the cookies won’t do anything, since they don’t sit in memory; they are merely read and uploaded to the server when requested, and they’re so small that they won’t slow things down noticeably. And the browser cache? It makes things faster! Think about it: What’s going to be faster when your browser needs an image, CSS, or JavaScript file — re-downloading it from the site or pulling it off the local hard drive? Emptying your cache was a storage space tip in the 90s when drive space was at enough of a premium that the browser cache could be a big chunk of it. Somehow, the tip eventually morphed into a bogus performance trick.

5: Registry cleaning is a miracle worker

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Game publisher Activision Blizzard announced on Monday that Modern Warfare 3, the latest entry in their blockbuster shooter series, topped $1 billion in worldwide sales a record 16 days after its release on November 8th. That beats the previous record holder, James Cameron’s 2009 3D film “Avatar”, which took 17 days to reach the mark.

Read: James Cameron slapped with lawsuit over “Avatar” plot

“Call of Duty has become that rare entertainment franchise that transcends its own genre” said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. “Core gamers love it, as our stellar reviews show. But every year, new people are drawn into Call of Duty.”

Reaching $1 billion in just over two weeks is impressive, but it’s not like we didn’t see it coming. The game already set new entertainment launch records by earning $400 million in its first 24 hours and $775 million in its first five days.

Modern Warfare 3′s spectacular start — a full 7% ahead of last year’s smash hit Call of Duty: Black Ops — helped November game sales exceed analyst expectations, though on the whole, 2011 has been a down year for the industry.

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1: Bad backups

When you are desperate to get your operation back online, nothing is worse than the sinking feeling you get when you discover that your backups are no good. In this day and age of 24/7 computing, it is often hard to get good backups. Lots of applications just do not seem to cooperate well with backup software. Sometimes, the backups themselves are stored improperly, which causes all sorts of issues. And of course, there are problems with overly complex backup applications, settings that do not work as expected, and hardware issues. All these factors conspire to produce backups that are not what we need when we need it. By monitoring your backup systems closely and testing them on a regular basis, you ensure that they will work when you need them most. And when they aren’t working, you need to make fixing them a top priority.

2: No way to restore

All the backups in the world aren’t worth a hill of beans if they require you to have a live CD or some other way of bootstrapping the restore process, and you do not have that available. You should, of course, discover this in your dry-runs. But you also need to make sure that the restore system is always handy. Putting a copy of it with the backups is a good idea.

3: Lack of a post-recovery testing plan

Ever restore a system, only to discover days or weeks later that there are continuing problems? I have, and it stinks. In the case of system or application issues, the root cause (like a virus) may be lurking in those backups. After you perform your restoration, you need to perform two major types of tests: those that verify that the general systems and applications are back up to snuff and those that check that the specific issue that triggered a restoration is resolved. The former needs to be put into place, written up, and published and practiced long before it is needed. The latter is typically determined on the fly as the situation warrants.

4: No hardware to recover to

Some people assume (or hope) that the disasters we recover from are software only (viruses, OS meltdowns, etc.). And their hardware purchases reflect it. The fact is, if you do not have a full system to restore to, one that matches the system you need to restore closely enough that a bare metal restore will work, you do not have a full recovery process. You have merely made a large gamble that your hardware never fails!

I understand completely how this happens; hardware is expensive and it is difficult to justify buying two servers when you need one. That’s one reason why I like to buy servers in batches, so I can have one fully redundant spare that can substitute for many others. If I ever suspect that the original hardware is bad, I can transfer it to the spare server quickly to verify that the issue is related to the server hardware. Expensive? Not in comparison to the cost of downtime waiting for new servers or parts to be delivered if I don’t have a spare.

5: Lack of essential components

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#1 EMC-based certificate handling

Personally, I truly hated certificate handling in Exchange 2007. It was confusing, convoluted and error-prone. In addition, everything had to be done from a PowerShell command line. I’m no stranger to the command line but I have grown accustomed to using a GUI to manage Microsoft products. Since certificate management isn’t something I do everyday, keeping the commands and processes straight was an exercise in frustration. Further, just figuring out what to put in the certificate request was kind of a nightmare. Fortunately, Microsoft has eased the pain by making it easier to use a wildcard certificate rather than a subject alternative name (SAN) certificate. However, for those organizations that need to use SAN certificates, the EMC-based wizard that helps you add a certificate walks you through the steps. You simply need to select checkboxes for which services should be included in the certificate (Figure A). You can also choose which domains should be included on the certificate (Figure B).

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