Week of the 4th: It’s vacation time. If you haven’t made arrangements for traveling managers to check in “just in case” now’s the time to start. It may be as simple as signing up for a Google Mail account the person can check from any Internet-connected computer. You may configure Web access to your current e-mail host. You may test an online collaboration service. Week of the 11th: Test the restore capabilities of your backup system. Be brave this time and reformat a PC disk, then restore it quickly using your Bare Metal Restore option. If none of your PCs merit that much trouble, see how long it takes to rebuild that PC and reconsider the Bare Metal Restore (or disk cloning) option. Week of the 18th: Now that most vendors put Vista on their PCs whether you want it or not, check online for bargains on last year’s computer models running Windows XP. Those are being flushed from inventory quickly, and many appear as “refurbished” systems.
Week of the 25th: Continue (or more likely start) a major refresh of your Web site. Every six months you should do something major. If you haven’t gotten that blog going yet, now’s a good time. Silly pictures from the employee picnic will help humanize the staff to your customers, and that’s always a good thing.
