Pertingo Computer Support

 The battle for desktop supremacy has definitely moved to web-based services, or "Cloud Computing". I can't open a trade magazine without coming across another service that Microsoft or Google are taking into beta (which is where they tend to stay until they figure out how to make money with them). The other day, I watched part of a video about Google's coming soon communications app called Wave. I signed up to be an early user. It looks like what email would have been had its original designers had any idea what they were creating.

Today I signed up for Microsoft's Live Mesh. It's one of the newer offerings in Microsoft's ever-expanding suite of applications available thru their live.com site. I carry around an 8 Gb USB drive that holds all of the data I'm currently using. I back it up online using Data Deposit Box so I can recover to within a day. Every now and then I need a file that isn't on the flash drive. With Live Mesh, I can create folders online that I can access from anywhere. I can also share those folders with others. I can even use Live Mesh to remote control any of the machines I've added to my mesh. This single app does for me what I currently need two applications and a piece of hardware to accomplish. And it's FREE!

Don't need all of that capability but would like to have some online disk space? How about 25 Gb from Microsoft SkyDrive for... you guessed it... FREE!

I've been telling my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers that they shouldn't expect these services to remain free forever. If they do, they'll be so awash in advertising as to make you want to avoid them (see mapquest to understand what I mean). While they are free though, we have lots of time to experiment with them to determine what we'd be willing to pay for when the time comes.