Recommendations - Quality Plus Consulting

The recommendations following are based upon many years of experience in supporting large environments of business workstations and servers as well as years of experience upgrading and expanding computers. These recommendations can change at any time because we stay updated on the current technology. So it is beneficial to you to check this site each time you are on the market for hardware or software. As always, contact us with any specific questions.

If you are in the market for reliable desktop PC hardware, we recommend the Dell OptiPlex line. They offer enough power for most people including those who do gaming or want to expand the capabilities of their computers in the future. We like the minitower models since they offer expansion room for adding other bay devices like a tape drive or more DVD/CD drives. These systems also have room for more than one hard drive. For the money, you are best served by purchasing the system with dual optical drives. http://www.dell.com/

QPC is a Dell reseller. If you wish to get a discount on a business-class Dell system, give us a call.

The only line of Dell notebooks we recommend is the Latitude line. These are intended to be more of a business line notebook, which means they are more standardized and long-term supportable. Any model of Latitude laptop is good as long as it is configured with the right components. For instance, you must get a 7200 RPM or solid state hard drive. Else overall system performance will suffer. There are many factors to consider. For a recommendation that will meet your specific business needs, please call or email us.

Dell PowerEdge servers offer a great range of solid, high-performing, easy to support servers for small to enterprise-class organizations. Contact us for more detailed advice in this area.

Dell monitors are high-quality and have an excellent warranty. Depending upon your needs, you may even want to get a Dell TV and use it for your PC monitor in combination TV/DVD/VCR. QPC has wall-mounted several of these units and they are very useful. If a person is a really heavy computer user, the best fit is a more square monitor than a more oblong (widescreen) shaped TV.

As a Dell VAR, QPC can get you great prices on high-quality Dell monitors.

Over the years, we have supported 500 printers, and at least 200 different types. When you have an experience like this, you understand the differences in reliability and supportability between printers. There are two good manufacturers of printers today. HP and Sharp. When you buy a printer or a multifunction unit, you need one that is going to be long-term reliable and easy to support. It should be easy to install and the manufacturer should keep the drivers updated as your operating system updates. HP is the one manufacturer that does all of that well. HP makes the most reliable and easy to support printers. As you know, we have no affiliation with HP. When we go to a client's place of work, we love to see HP printers. Whenever we see other brands, we know there will be supportability issues.

We recommend Sharp brand copy machines. We have found that Office Copy Equipment has consistently offered good service and pricing to our clients.

When looking up printers or any other computer hardware, you want to reference it by its actual model number. So look on HP's website for the actual model number and use that when searching for it on the Internet. Buy.com offers very good prices on many units. Increasingly, you can find good deals on Amazon as well.

We recommend that any printer you get should have duplexing features and be networked. Networked printers have a lower TCO than USB printers.

Call us for any other recommendations or needs you have.

You may hear technical people talk about how good Cisco equipment is. But do they ever talk about the price or the fact that you have to pay for a very expensive annual support contract with Cisco to get drivers or firmware updates? No, most people do not look at the total cost of ownership of a unit, software or hardware. Cisco may be a great option for a company with thousands of employees who has their own IT staff to configure the very complex equipment and pay the annual support costs.

QPC uses WatchGuard equipment exclusively for business-class needs. We register the equipment such that your business has a direct support contract with WatchGuard providing hardware/software support and warranty regardless of whether or not QPC is the current IT service provider. One of the things you will see other consulting firms do is resell you Cisco equipment, and you cannot contact Cisco directly for support. So you have no password, no warranty, and no support contract. So when you find you don't like them as an IT service provider, your investment into that hardware is wasted as it must be replaced. Have some fun. Call them up and ask for the password to your firewall.

If you are a home user or small business with a high-speed Internet connection, you need a hardware-based firewall. Hardware-based firewalls usually function as a router, switch, and DHCP server. Some models are also a wireless access point. Contact us for help selecting a proper unit.

Did you know that Time Warner Cable offers business class service for your home office? Contact us for details. No, we don't resell their services, but we do have a lot of useful information to save you money and make your business more productive.

We highly recommend Trend Micro Antivirus/Antispyware. Whenever you go to buy the software, just buy the latest version you can buy at the time. The more recent versions have script detection and blocking capabilities. This is very useful in the war against trojans and evil scripts that may be loaded to your system by evil websites. We call them evil, because the only purpose for these scripts is to invade and take over your computer for bad and often illegal uses. Updated antivirus/antispyware software is a key component in your system's defense mechanism. Trend offers free tech support.

If you have need for two licenses, you should look at a 3-user pack. It is cheaper than buying two licenses separately. And if you have need for 5 licenses or more, get a volume license agreement for the antivirus software.

For servers, we recommend Microsoft Windows 2008 Server R2 64-bit. If you are buying a new server, you should go with X64 version since all server hardware you buy now is 64-bit capable. If you have a situation where you still have some old business software that will not run on X64, you should put that software on a virtual machine on the X64 main server.

For desktop PCs and notebooks, we recommend Microsoft Windows 7 Professional. The vast majority of business applications will run on it. If you have a business critical application, like practice management software, be sure to check with the application vendor for OS and hardware compatibility requirements.

Many people have wondered if they should upgrade their existing systems to a new OS. We don't recommend installing any OS on hardware that was not designed to run it. If your system was designed to run XP, stick with that until you need to buy a new computer.

The built-in Windows firewall is very good in Vista and Windows 7. The firewall in XP could be very good as well if it was configured properly. If you are using good antivirus like Trend, you don't need to purchase another firewall product. A lot of people think you need to buy the "internet security" suite product made by the antivirus vendors. We don't care for those tools as they tend to be more trouble than they are worth. The settings are difficult to control and the products are often overly-aggressive.

If you are a home user with a very basic environment, then the internet security suite might be good for you. But everyone else who requires their computers to talk to each other needs to be able to control those communications and the internet security suites conflict with those purposes.

American Power Conversion Corporation, APC, is the industry leader for UPS and surge suppression hardware. http://www.apcc.com/

When shopping for UPS units, pay special attention to how many outlets on the device are actually UPS protected versus just surge suppression protected. If you are planning to use the UPS to protect your computer, then be sure to purchase one that has the capability to talk to the PC and shut it down in event of an extended power outage. The PC operating system can become corrupt in the event of a hard power outage. A UPS with auto-shutdown software can fully protect against this risk.

The VA output the UPS delivers versus the demand your equipment places on the UPS determines the runtime. Runtime is how long the UPS will provide battery power to all the devices powered by it on the UPS outlets. So the larger the VA output of the UPS, the longer the runtime. You must be sure you purchase a unit with enough capacity to protect all of your devices without overloading the UPS. APC has a very nice UPS model calculator on their website.

Purpose	APC UPS Model
4 UPS + 3 surge outlets; 700VA output	BR900
6 UPS + 2 surge outlets; 1000VA output	BR1000
6 UPS outlets; 1500VA output	Smart-UPS 1500

Where you buy your equipment and software depends upon your comfort level with Internet purchasing and the amount of anonymity you desire. QPC is a Dell provider and passes on to clients the discount on items purchased from Dell through our volume purchasing account. We recommend you contact us and get assistance on purchasing equipment that best meets your needs.

You should be very cautious of taking advice from anyone who works at a retail store. While they may be able to tell you where so-and-so is located in the store, we highly encourage you to not expect information of any more value than that from them. Their job is to sell you something in the store, not to point you in the right direction. If they really knew how to design solutions for you, they would likely not have that job. As always, when in doubt, contact us.

Over the years we have used a lot of different website hosting solution providers. We don't like using the same hosting provider for email, DNS, domain, website. Check out the Breakfast Bytes radio show archive from 3/24/2007 for more information as to why. There is one website hosting provider that has a good blend of price and great support. They have been able to fulfill every software support requirement of all our clients. Their support has been great and they have successfully recovered websites from backup when they blew up. So we strongly recommend Infosaic.

There are a multitude of reasons why you may not want to use your ISP-provided email account. Certainly, if you are in business, you need to have an email address that matches your domain. You don't want to lose your email address and have to incur the expense of changing all your marketing materials when your email address changes.

For most businesses, even one-person businesses, it makes the most sense to go with an outsourced Exchange-based email solution. Many businesses of 40 people use a hosted solution because it is more cost effective than having their own Exchange server. A business may initially think that ~$180 per user per year is a expensive. However, it's a fixed cost. It represents your email TCO (total cost of ownership). However, if you host Exchange on your own server, you must pay labor fees to maintain, service, antivirus/antispam, and patch it. Thus, you have no way of controlling TCO. Oh yeah, and good luck trying to keep yourself off the blacklists.

If you are a business that has a full-time IT manager, and you have more than 150 employees, it may make sense to host Exchange internally. But keep in mind that we mean a FULL-TIME IT manager, not someone who you call IT manager, yet a chunk of their duties involve something other than management of the computer systems. Managing Exchange takes significant talent, training, and time. Most small businesses cannot afford to hire a technical person who has adequate training to properly manage Exchange so that it is a stable and successful tool for the business. Even most mid-sized businesses cannot afford to have a full-time Exchange administrator on staff.

Please see the whitepaper on Exchange-based email for more details.
Only rarely is a POP3-based email solution appropriate. Please contact us for more information.

If you do decide to get POP3 or Exchange-based email, we recommend Mail2Web/MyHosting as the vendor of choice for these services. Click link below.

DynDNS.com should be used for domain and DNS hosting. NEVER host your DNS, domain, email, and website with the same vendor. Listen to the 3/24/2007 Breakfast Bytes radio show archive for extensive details.