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28 GPSolo 54 (2011)
Time to Upgrade

handle is hein.journals/gpsolo28 and id is 492 raw text is: By Victoria L. Herring I ow can I improve the performance of my com- puter? Is it time to upgrade? These questions are standard fare for lawyers and their offices when a new computer or operating system comes out, or-when their machines just feel slow and cumbersome. It's an important question because it di- rectly implicates how you do your work and how you deal with the expense.. One of my weaknesses is for any and all new Apple technology. However, I enjoy working with and learning new computers, software, and related objects. This is re- ally not something for everyone or even most; if you're in a law office that depends on regularity, being an early adopter is not for you. Better to let fools such as I go through the pains of upgrades or newness and report back to the wiser ones. But, having said that, at some point your office hardware or software will simply need an upgrade. So, what do you do? Probably the first questions to ask are how long will this take and how much will this cost. Depending on the answers, the decision to upgrade or replace might be relatively easy. If you can get a new machine fairly inexpensively and sell yours (after destroying or wiping clean the drive) to cover some of the cost, it might make more sense to go ahead and get a new machine. If the * improvement involves basic maintenance steps or only the addition of RAM to the machine, you can probably put off the day you'll need a full replacement. Before I summarize some steps you can take, I first S want to encourage you to buy a downloadable book put out by TidBITS Publishing called Take Control of Main taining Your Mac. Authored by Joe Kissell, who has writ- S ten a plethora of works to help even neophytes get the most from their various electronics, it's a great review and step-by-step discussion of how to maintain your Mac computer. And before you even think of buying rn new or paying for upgrades to what you have, consider where some basic maintenance might help improve your computer's performance. This title and many others AA can be viewed and downloaded at Take Control eBooks (www.takecontrolbooks.com). This short article is basically a summary of Victoria L. Herring practices in Des Moines, Iowa, in an office that has used only Appie/Macs since the early 1980s. She may be reached at vlh@herringlaw.com. considerations mentioned in that book, as well as other research, noted along the way. Now, let me begin by clarifying some assumptions: I'm talking to people who have only one to three or so computers in their office, who don't have a regular staff tech person, and who sometimes deal with tech issues themselves. I'll also assume that you have already invest- ed in some essential things to make your office function properly: hard drives or cloud storage for backing up, a surge protector to protect your systems, and some sort of lock or security system to deter or prevent loss and theft. Assuming that the above is true, and that you have come to the point of considering upgrades or replace- ments, your first step will be to conduct proper main- tenance to make sure your hardware is functioning as best it can. The following steps, discussed more fully in Kissell's book, should be taken: 1. Back up your computer(s). Anything essential and mission-critical should be backed up two or three times in different locations (e.g., on a hard drive at home or in a safe deposit box or in the cloud). Murphy's law-if something can go wrong, it will-can rear its ugly head in the midst of this process. One suggestion is to not upgrade every- thing at once, but to go step-by-step and work on one computer or workstation at a time, so that at least one computer is available for those things you must have. Or, if you're a solo and only have one machine, invest in a large external drive and make a bootable clone of your essential machine just in case. Make sure it works, that it will boot up and run things if you need it. You should be using Time Machine anyway and supplement- ing that with running either Carbon Copy Cloner 54 ~SOLO December 2011 SOLO December 2011 54

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