Ask Shak:
Product Allows Users to Tap Into
Home or Office Computer on the Road

ASK SHAK YOUR PERSONAL COMPUTER QUESTIONS

One of the most important relationships you’ll ever have is with your personal computer. There’s perhaps no other component of our business life that’s more vexing as that box that sits on most people’s desks. Everyone has computer questions and we’re here to assist you in that department. Below are a few questions I’ve received recently from readers. I hope the answers will be useful to you.

Mel in Manoa Valley

Dear Mel:
Your question is very timely. We just road-tested an excellent product called PC Anywhere from Symantec, a southern California company that has been producing "utilities" (as these types of products are called) for many years. You may have heard of a product of theirs called Norton Utilities, which is their flagship product. If you need to access your home or office computer remotely this is the ticket. It will allow you to transfer files from one computer to another--whether in the same office or on a different continent--quite easily. The only issue we had was with setting up the product. This is where Symantec's telephone tech support came in very handy. I had a few questions to ask and the people on the other end of the line were very sharp and helpful. I usually didn't have to wait too long either. Support, incidentally, is free for the first 90 days. After that, you gotta pay them.

Once the product was set up, we had no problem using it. The only thing you have to remember before you leave town is to fire up PC Anywhere on your "host" computer. (The host would in effect be the computer that you want to access information from.) After that it's easy to connect with your home or office computer wherever you are. By being able to operate your machine from afar you're in a position to obtain whatever information you need or even run any program you want-all remotely. The price for this program is about $170. It's well worth it if you travel a lot. Check out www.symantec.com for more info.

If you are technically more savvy, as an inexpensive alternative, you can set up your home PC as a dial up server which comes with Windows 95 & 98. Win98/95 Dial-up Server allows users of Windows 95 to access a local area network while out of the office. This feature allows a small office, or workgroup to share data, or send and receive mail remotely through a TCP/IP connection. File sharing, however gets more complicated since Windows File Sharing must be enabled for the particular directory your files reside in. If your files are not in a shared directory, you won't be able to get them remotely. Also, if your computer is connected on a network, you leave these shared directories open on the network.

You can find more information on setting up and configuring Dial Up Server here:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/ServiceWare/Windows/Win98/76JCWOJTE.ASP

Let me make one more suggestion. After you've backed up your data with your tape backup, test the hardware and software to make sure that it works. In other words, it's not enough to back up the tape. If, after you're hard drive crashes you find that your not able to restore the data, the backup job is not going to be of much use. So here's what you do. After you've backed up your data, pick one small file, say a letter or some other document from your database. Move it to another directory or erase it from your hard drive. Then go and look for it on the tape and try to restore the file. If this can be easily done, chances are, when and if your machine goes down, you'll be able to get all your data back. Perform this procedure on a regular basis.

Although most of the tape backup software come with a data verify option already built in, I still recommend this above procedure to be absolutely safe.

Pacific Business News, November 26 1999