Tips for Your Home and Office

In less than the minute it takes for you to read this first paragraph, a talented thief can break through your window bars or pick the best of door locks to get into your home or office. Without a well thought-out alarm system, you will return home or to your office only to discover that the thief got away with all of your valuables.

With the increase in break-ins to both homes and offices, insurance companies are now requiring the installation of alarm systems before granting insurance coverage. Efrat Networks is a leader in the installation and maintenance of both simple and complex alarm systems. We don’t view the alarm system as a “rubber stamp” for the insurance companies, but rather a way to prevent theft.

Our objective is to keep the thieves away. To do this, we like installing ‘watch-out’ detectors and ‘curtain’ sensors on the perimeter of the home. These are well known to thieves and can be installed in full view or somewhat hidden. Usually, when they see either of these devices, they will opt to avoid any attempts at a break-in.

Along with a thief, the gardener, cats, dogs, birds and other animals, can set off the alarm at the perimeter by entering the line of sight of these sensors. Efrat Networks uses special methods to prevent, or at least minimize, false alarms caused by animals. However, without an infrared camera on the house’s perimeter, you’ll never know for sure if a thief or animal set off the alarm. What is important here is that the thief will not get close enough to the house to start a break-in.

For apartments with little or no perimeters to use as protection, Efrat Networks supplies and installs wired and wireless alarm systems covering all entrances, accessable windows and the inside of the apartment. These systems can be easily activated by a keypad or a 4-button keyfob. In addition, if you leave the house and don’t remember if you set the alarm, you can set it remotely using your cell phone or any land-line phone.

If you are living in a home that is over 10 years old, a wireless alarm system will, most likely, be the best solution. Adding new wires through old tubes can be a costly challenge. On the other hand, new homes or new builds are ideal for wired alarm systems.

In today’s society, when it is no longer possible to rely on a lock and bolt to keep thieves away, Efrat Networks offers excellent and cost effective solutions to give you security and peace of mind.

Windows Operating Systems - How to Decide

Ever since the release of the Vista operating system, Efrat Networks has received ongoing inquiries as to the benefits of Vista over Windows XP. While there actually may be some benefits, we continue to recommend to our clients to stay with XP Home or Pro. Vista is heavy with unnecessary bells and whistles that will severly slow down your computer speed.

Windows 7 is supposed to be released this Fall, and Vista will be ‘trashed’. Apparently, we’re not the only one’s who have avoided use of Vista…

Some general rules of thumb:
1) Don’t be the first on your block to have a new Microsoft Product.  Microsoft relies on millions of end users to de-bug their products in the field.  It pays to wait and see.  Let someone else, the “first adopters”, pull out their hair on Microsoft’s new and green products.
2) If you live in Israel, rule #1 applies even more, because there are always language issues in whatever version is released. Hebrew language issues will be fixed in subsequent service packs and updates.
3) If you are forced to purchase Vista along with a new laptop, ask for Vista Pro. This version can be downgraded to XP Pro without requiring the purchase of an XP license. If you get the laptop with Vista Home and you have a spare XP license on hand, call Efrat Networks and we’ll help you to switch over to XP.  However, this means that the old computer has to have its XP operating system removed before the transfer to the new computer.
4) If you are ’stuck’ with Vista Home, you should also take advantage of Efrat Networks’ expertise to help you slim it down faster than Jenny Craig can say “frozen dinner”, and we’ll help you eliminate those Vista functions that are totally useless for your day-to-day operation of your computer (close to 50% of the functions that run in your computer memory), thereby streamlining your processing speed significantly and giving you a much more pleasant overall computing experience.

To get the ball rolling with Windows 7, DELL has announced that anyone who buys a DELL computer with a Vista license from now through the end of 2009, they will be able to upgrade to Windows 7 for a discounted price of $45 + VAT. So, if you are considering buying a DELL computer, now would be a good time to speak to Efrat Networks about the purchase.

What about Windows 7?

The prize for confusing the the most sane of people goes, as expected, to Microsoft. There are six versions (!!!) of Windows 7: Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. The hype coming from Microsoft is abound, and the reviews are many. In the next few issues (we have time until the Fall), we’ll try to create some guidelines to help you decide what version to choose (if any, at all).

Home Computer
If you plan to buy a PC for use at home, Windows 7 Home Premium is the preferred version. It will do everything you expect Windows to do: run Windows Media Center, network your home computers and devices, support multi-touch technologies and dual-monitor setups, and more. It’s the main version for most people, for home PCs and laptops.

Home & Office Computer
If you also take your laptop to the office, you should examine the computing environment both at home and the office. For example, do you need to run legacy applications (i.e., old programs)? Do you want automatic file backups built into Windows, as opposed to using Syncplicity?

If the answer to these questions is “yes,” you should buy Windows 7 Professional. It contains all the features of Home Premium, but adds support for Domain Joining, which you may need to log on to your office’s corporate network; Windows XP Mode, which makes old software that’s incompatible with Windows 7 run as if it was running on XP; and Microsoft’s Backup and Restore Center, which is an integrated file and folder backup utility for automated backup of important files. Essentially, it’s for any computer that will spend half its life at your home, and the other half at the office.

If you’re just the average consumer with a new PC, these are the two editions to decide between. But there are four others out there.

In the next edition of Get Connected, we’ll try to clear up what they’re all about.