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Updated at 2:30 p.m. PDT with comments from Iomega Chief Executive Jonathan Huberman.

And now for something completely different.

Software and storage company EMC announced Tuesday that it will purchase Iomega for $213 million, or $3.85 per share. EMC expects the deal to close sometime during the second quarter of this year.

EMC has traditionally played in enterprise-level storage and software arenas. Iomega is best-known for hard drives and storage for consumers and small-business customers. EMC hinted that this is just its first move into consumer hardware business.

"Iomega will play a key role in EMC's strategy to expand our information storage and management capabilities deeper into the high-growth consumer and small business markets," EMC Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Joe Tucci said in a statement.

Iomega says the acquisition by the larger EMC will enable the company to grow in a way that it currently cannot. "Our markets are adjacent, but not overlapping," Iomega Chief Executive Jonathan Huberman said in an interview with CNET News.com Tuesday. "We have strong brand and channel presence in business and consumer (markets), but what we do lack is scale."

Iomega earned $336 million in sales in 2007, while EMC did more than $13 billion in sales worldwide last year.

Once the acquisition is complete, Huberman will lead the newly minted consumer/small-business products division in EMC's storage platforms group. The division will be built completely around Iomega people and brands. Huberman said no decisions have been made on possible staff cuts at Iomega. "But the expectation is that this is about growth," he said. "The vast majority will be coming into the new organization."

Huberman said a major opportunity for his company at EMC is to take advantage not only of its scale and channel partnerships, but its intellectual property, particularly in the area of networked storage products.

EMC has been on anacquisition tear during the last few years, most recently snapping up Pi, a cloud-computing start-up.

Nothing will stall your workday faster than a dropped network connection or recalcitrant peripheral. There's a good chance that just a few tweaked Windows settings will get you rolling again. With some luck, the tools built into the OS will be all the help you need. And if Windows' diagnostic tools come up short, there are some other resources at your troubleshooting disposal.

Diagnose network disconnections in Vista and XP
One of Vista's most useful new tools is the revamped Network Diagnostics utility. When a Web page won't load in Internet Explorer, you may be prompted to run the utility by clicking Tools > Diagnose Connection Problems. You can also open the program by clicking the network icon in the system tray, choosing Network and Sharing Center, and clicking Diagnose and Repair in the left pane.

Some problems the program will fix automatically, but it may also display instructions for correcting the glitch manually, or it might simply point to Vista's Help and Support file. The tool can't diagnose problems outside of the local PC, such as your ISP's servers being down, but it helps you determine whether the source is in your system or something else.

XP's Network Diagnostics tool lacks the troubleshooting chops of its Vista counterpart, but it can help you pinpoint the location of the failure. To run it from Internet Explorer, click Tools > Diagnose Connection Problems. To open it without IE, click Start > Run, type %windir%\network diagnostic\xpnetdiag.exe, and press Enter.

If everything checks out with your PC's network settings, ping your ISP's servers to make sure the connection is working. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt, type ping cnet.com (or any domain name), and press Enter. If your network link is working, you'll see four lines of replies, followed by a list of ping statistics. A failed ping test indicates a lost connection to your ISP. Before you get on the horn to your ISP, try turning off your router and then turning it back on again. This is sometimes sufficient to reset the device. If that doesn't reestablish your network link, it's time to get on the phone to the company's support line. (To get a more detailed look of the path packets take from your PC to a Web site, type tracert, the domain name, and press Enter to see a list of all the stops the packets make along the way to their destination.) When you're done, type exit and press Enter to close the Command Prompt window.

Ping a Web site from Windows' Command Prompt to determine whether the link to your ISP is working.

Fixes for AWOL hardware
If a printer, monitor, or other device starts acting up, make sure all cables are plugged in tight, and all adapter connections are nice and snug. You might think it's an urban myth, but it happens: about a year ago I thought my hard drive was toast, but it turns out an internal cable had come loose. (Also make sure the danged thing is powered on; that happens too.)

It's easy to tell someone to update their drivers, but it's not so easy to do, especially if the device is more than a year or two old, and the hardware vendor has abandoned it. First, you have to search the vendor's site for the latest driver for that specific model, and after you find and download it, you have to open Windows Device Manager, navigate to and double-click the entry for the device in question, and then run the Update Driver wizard, pointing to the new driver when prompted to. On top of everything, there's no guarantee the new driver will solve the problem.

You may have more luck using System Restore to turn back the clock to a time when the device worked, but this is no guaranteed fix either. Another longshot is running Windows' built-in troubleshooters. In my experience, they're a waste of time: I must've tried the troubleshooting wizards dozens of times over the years, and not once were they any use. You'll find them in the troubleshooting section of the inappropriately named Help and Support Center: press F1 from the desktop to open the app.

Rather than looking to Windows or the device's vendor for help diagnosing your problem, your time may be better spent searching one of the many Web forums for the category of product. Two of my favorites are those at Tom's Hardware, and CNET's PC Hardware Forum.

Tomorrow: automate your online storage without spending a dime.

Last week, IBM System Technology Group (STG) announced its plans for a reorg. Historically, STG was organized around five hardware "brands" (i.e. mainframe, storage, microprocessors, etc.), but this led to customer confusion and channel overlap. What's more, IBM found its salespeople competing with each other in the field. Something had to give.

IBM, the company that practically invented business computing, will now market its systems in a software, solutions, or industry context. To me, this is an indication that the rules of the technology game continue to evolve into a model where vertical solutions trump horizontal technologies. In the old days, everyone had a General Ledger so you could sell hardware and software across industry. Now everything is customized, specialized, and integrated. Tech companies (especially hardware firms) are being forced to pick their industry battles and partnerships more carefully than ever before.

IBM isn't the only firm moving in this direction. Cisco Systems sells communications solutions, not switches and routers, these days, and EMC continues to build a company focused on data governance, management, and security, not just storage. But IBM is now pushing this model beyond marketing programs and into field sales operations. Look for others to follow soon.

My 3-year-old Hewlett-Packard PC stopped playing optical discs a couple of months ago. Not only were the built-in DVD and CD-ROM drives out of commission, I couldn't even get a brand-new external DVD drive to work. I searched and searched for driver updates, but came up empty. It wasn't until I happened upon a Registry patch on Chris Pirillo's great Lockergnome site that I got the machine to recognize the optical drives.

The patch was provided by a volunteer who had no affiliation with HP, Microsoft, or the drive vendors. It's not uncommon for PC experts to tell people to update their drivers, but I wonder if these people ever look for updates themselves.

Here's another example: I've got a Samsung SyncMaster 170MP LCD monitor that I've been using for going on five years now. It's a great little monitor (though at 17 inches diagonal it wasn't considered "little" when I bought it). Unfortunately, when I upgraded to Vista, I noticed some minor pixel swimming. As PC nuisances go, the dancing pixels are trivial--they're apparent only where a dark window edge meets a light one--but I'd rather they stopped their shuffling.

I just visited the support section of Samsung's site only to find that the company doesn't offer a Vista version of the driver for this model. Nor could I find one at any of the many sites that specialize in device-driver downloads. So I guess I'll have to put up with the pixel sizzle until I collect enough loose change to buy a new Vista-ready monitor.

Rules for avoiding hardware obsolescence
1) Don't upgrade your operating system. If the OS didn't come with the hardware, there's a great chance that an update will render some of your PC's components unusable.

2) Don't expect hardware vendors to support the products you buy from them more than a year after the purchase. In fact, you can't count on much help from them at all after the standard warranties expire. You may get troubleshooting help from other users of the products, however.

3) Before you buy any hardware, find out when it was originally released. I believe all PC components should come with a freshness date. About a year ago I bought a Linksys router that was reviewed favorably by several independent tech sites--when it was originally released 18 months earlier. In the interim, it was found to require a firmware update, but I didn't find out about its outdated firmware until I spent a day and a half trying unsuccessfully to install it on my home network. (After I downloaded the update, it worked without a hitch.)

4) Be careful when you mix and match old and new hardware and software. Replacing the hard drive on your trusty-but-ancient PC with an enormous-capacity drive that spins twice as fast as the old one will work only if the system is capable of supporting the faster speed and higher capacity. You may find it's more efficient to spend the money as part of the cost of a new PC.

5) When all else fails, bug the vendor. Send an e-mail to the company's support address (but don't bother calling the toll-free support number unless you have lots and lots of time on your hands). Detail the problem, and ask for a solution. Just don't expect to be offered one. However, if enough people complain about the same problem, the chances improve that the vendor will actually do something useful, even if it's simply to offer a discount on a replacement.

Wednesday: The first steps toward a New Year's resolution to compute in a Microsoft-less (and Apple-less) world.

The $198 Google-approved Web 2.0 gPC.

(Credit: Everex)

On Thursday, WalMart begins selling the Everex Green gPC TC2502, a $198, low-power, Linux-based PC designed primarily for running Web 2.0 applications.

When users first fire up their gPC, they'll get a Mac-like desktop with a series of program icons "docked" across the bottom. The icons are bookmarks to popular and useful Web 2.0 services from Google and other vendors. There are icons for Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube, for example, as well as Meebo, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Sprinkled into the lineup are some non-Web-based apps, like Skype and Gimp, but the novice user won't know, initially, which are local applications and which are Web services.

Isn't that as it should be? An app is an app, so why should users know or care if it's running on their local PC or in the cloud?

The gPC icon dock

(Credit: CNET)

Unfortunately, using the gPC's Web apps isn't as transparent as we'd like, although that's not Everex's fault. Web apps still run in a browser (and the gPC won't ship with Adobe AIR or another runtime platform that runs online apps in their own windows), so each time a user clicks on one of the icons that's pointing to a URL, it will fire up Firefox or a new tab in it. Also, Web apps require their own online logins (though if you're logged into Google, you have to worry about that only once per session). And, of course, there's the question of where one's data is stored. The gPC has a hard disk, but users of the Web apps won't be putting files on it. (It also has OpenOffice installed on it, but users will have to dig to find the suite.)

My criticisms are aimed mostly at Web apps in general, and this is nonetheless a great product. It costs less than $200 and you don't have to buy one for a child you've never met to get it (not that that's a bad thing, but it would drive up your cost). It will do what most of us need, thanks to all the Web 2.0 sites and services that are available now and that don't require the equivalent of a Cray supercomputer to run acceptably fast. The gPC, which Everex is selling with Google's blessing, gives us a look at what a Web PC should be: A much cheaper but almost-as-capable alternative to a regular PC or Mac. This is the closest thing I've seen to a Web appliance that might actually sell.

The gPC runs a 1.5GHz VIA C7-D processor and ships with 512MB of RAM and a 80GB hard drive. The operating system is gOS, from a new company of the same name. It's a version of Ubuntu 7.10 with the Enlightenment window manager. The $198 price tag does not include a monitor. But it does include 24/7 800-number tech support.

The gPC will be available at Walmart.com and at these Wal-Mart retail stores.

See also these interesting Linux-powered products from Everex competitor Asus: The P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard with embedded Firefox, and the Eee PC 4G, and low-cost Linux laptop

The gPC runs all the Web apps you'll need as well as several useful Linux-based desktop apps.

(Credit: CNET)

(Credit: Photo illustration by Handvertising USA)

Advertising space is scarce. No wonder advertisers are innovative when it comes to taking advantage of underutilized real estate--such as the human skin.

Handvertising USA is an Orange County-based company that connects advertisers with customers willing to display ads on their hands.

"Almost everyone has been to a county fair, swap meet, bar or club and had had their hand stamped for proof of entry. We have found a better use for this space that could make everyone happy," says CEO Mike Brown. "We find venues also use the stamps to increase business. For example, venues are offering special prices on drinks if the customer has a particular Handvertising stamp. People are requesting particular stamps because they want to fit in and they want the drink special," he says.

This low-tech advertising idea will not work everywhere: Barcelona's exclusive VIP Baja Beach Club offers its VIP guests the option to implant a special microchip in their upper arms. The RFID-recognized chip not only gives them special access to VIP lounges, but also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks. No fraud possible. And identify theft requires body theft.

Both examples indicate the renaissance of the human body in the marketing mix. While sidewalk wavers and door-to-door promoters are part of the old-school marketing arsenal, the new solutions are more sophisticated and go literally under the skin. Not only are the borders between human body and technology slowly disappearing; advertising, network, commerce, and consumer are converging as well.

Humans are still the best hardware. (By the way, they're still the most powerful software, too; it will take at least five more years, experts forecast, to develop a computer processor that is on par with the capabilities of a 6-year old child.) Consequently, NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest wireless operator, is working on a mobile phone that sends electric signals through the human body to transmit data, enabling electronic payments or data transfer at the touch of a finger.

USB Flash drives are great. Securing them, however, is not so great. They are easily lost and the more you use one, the more likely it will contain files you consider sensitive. Corsair recently came out with a product that takes an entirely new approach to securing flash drives.

Seeing as this is a Defensive Computing blog, it goes without saying that my personal flash drives are secure. I use a free, open-source program called TrueCrypt. There are however, three problems with this approach:

1. The hassle of installing TrueCrypt and learning how to use it. There is a portable version of it, which I use, but TrueCrypt is a large program with many features (the manual is more than 100 pages) and may be just too much for some people.
2. TrueCrypt only works if you are logged on to Windows as an administrative class user.
3. There is no Mac version (there is a Linux version).

My first approach to security was worse. I bought secure flash drives, models that came with their own security software preinstalled. The secure models cost more than their insecure siblings and the software from each vendor worked differently. At least TrueCrypt gave me a personal standard.

The new Corsair Flash Padlock replaces software with buttons. The side of the device has five buttons with numbers on them, and you press the buttons to chose a password initially and then to enter it later.

I have not used a Flash Padlock, but Scot Finnie wrote a review just a few days ago in his aptly named newsletter, Scot's Newsletter. There can be a huge gap between a good idea and good product. According to Scot, the Flash Padlock is a good product.

For one thing, it's designed to be locked and unlocked without any involvement from a computer. And there are lights that clearly indicate whether it is locked or not. Perhaps most importantly, Scot says "The user interface for the Flash Padlock is very well thought out." If you ever carry sensitive files on a flash drive, read Scot's review.

On the other hand, if you can live with the restrictions of TrueCrypt, then see this getting started cheat sheet that Gina Trapani did in June of last year. Geek to Live: Encrypt your data

If we could only settle on a name for these thingies.

Update: October 3, 2007. Scot wrote a follow-up to his review of the Corsair Flash Padlock drive which notes that the case can be unscrewed to provide access to the un-encrypted flash ram, which sort of defeats the high security. In addition he notes that the encryption software on the Lexar JumpDrive supports Macs despite the fact that the documentation doesn't say so. Finally, he mentions the IronKey flash drive which is very secure and very expensive.

Everyone knows to use a surge protector for their computer. But which one? How do you choose? Welcome to surge protector school.

As their name implies, surge protectors prevent voltage spikes from entering a computer (or whatever else is plugged into them). They are available in a variety of types and, to paraphrase the manual that came with a Dell server, usually provide a level of protection commensurate with the cost of the device. In other words, you get what you pay for.

A surge protector is not a power strip, although a low end model may look like a power strip. Power strips are just extension cords and won't protect a computer from power surges. If it doesn't say "Surge Suppressor," it is probably just a power strip. You can also judge by the price, power strips are cheaper than surge suppressors. A device with no Joules rating is a power strip.

There are many features that go into making a good surge protector.

To begin with, electrical surges can happen on any wire. Thus, you need a surge protector that protects every wire going into your computer. This includes the phone line, if you use dial-up or DSL, and Ethernet network cables, if the computer is on a LAN. Lower end surge protectors only protect the electrical outlet; to get Ethernet or phone line protection, expect to pay a bit more. As a starting point, expect to pay from $20 to $35 for a surge protector.

Have you ever blown a fuse? Some surge protectors work like fuses, and when they absorb all the electricity they can, they die. They may die either from a single big surge or from absorbing many small surges over a long period of time.

What then?

Most likely, a dead surge protector will indicate the fact that it is no longer protecting your equipment with some type of indicator light. However, months after installing it, will you know what the light means? You may not even see it, if the surge protector is behind furniture.

When the surge suppression no longer functions, some surge protectors will continue to provide electricity to the devices. Better models cut off the juice, which protects your devices and makes sure you know to replace the surge protector. Never use a surge protector that provides unprotected power! The last time I checked, the current models of both APC and Tripp Lite would never provide unprotected power to your devices.

You may be thinking that fuses have been replaced by circuit breakers. When there is an overload, a circuit breaker trips and you can easily switch it back later without having to go to the hardware store and buy a new fuse.

Better surge protectors work this way, too. These models are designed to cut off power in a surge rather than absorb it. As a result, they should not wear out over time. There will be a little button that pops out, and you can pop it back in after the surge.

How can you tell if a particular surge protector works like a fuse or circuit breaker? One hint is the warranty, if it has a lifetime warranty then it probably works like a circuit breaker. I suggest only purchasing a surge protector with a lifetime warranty. In general, both APC and Tripp Lite surge protectors have lifetime warranties.

Next up, clamping speed and let-through voltage.

To a computer nerd like myself, RAID refers not to a bug spray but to various ways of hooking together multiple hard disks. The various approaches are referred to as levels. Raid levels one through five are designed to decrease the chances that a hard disk failure will result in lost data. Typically RAID configurations are used in server machines as opposed to personal computers.

Raid level zero, however, is the black sheep of the RAID family. It's goal is performance rather than reliability. I'm writing this posting because two of my clients have been burned by their inadvertent use of RAID level zero. Consider this a word to the wise.

Client one purchased an external hard disk from LaCie. This person needed lots of storage space and, at the time, this particular model was top of the line, offering the most storage capacity. The reason it offered more storage than cheaper competing models is that internally there were two 3.5-inch hard disks instead of the usual one. While it looked to the outside world like one chunk of 500 gigabytes, the internal reality was that there were two 250 GB hard disks.

Client two owned a high end Dell XPS tower with two internal hard disks. This person wanted the latest and greatest and fastest computer. Thus, Dell configured the two internal hard disks for speed--RAID level zero. Like the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

The hard disk is significantly slower than the processor and RAM. Thus to get the fastest read/write performance, RAID level zero stores half of a file on one hard disk and half on the other. Using both hard disks in parallel should reduce the total time needed to write a file.

To someone designing a computer system, the term single point of failure is like kryptonite to Superman. The term refers to a single point in the system which should it fail, would bring down the whole house of cards (so to speak). In an automobile, each tire is a single point of failure, thus they all have a spare in the trunk.

In a personal computer the hard disk is a single point of failure. However, in a RAID level zero configuration, there are three separate single points of failure involving the hard disks. Should either hard disk fail, all is lost because each disk contains half of every file. Oops.

In addition, both of my clients were also dependent on the RAID hard disk controller, the thing with the intelligence to split files as they are written out to the hard disks and re-assemble them back together when read. If the hard disk controller fails, the files may still be alive and well and happy on the hard disks, but you can't read them. Recovering from a RAID level zero controller error might cost thousands of dollars, as its a job for the most sophisticated data recovery companies.

RAID Zero with a failed disk. Click for full-size.

In the case of the client with the Dell computer, it was fairly easy to determine that the problem was with one of the hard disks. Replacing it, re-establishing the Raid zero environment and then restoring a disk image backup got the machine up and running. Disk image backups will be the subject of an upcoming posting on this blog.

The client with the external hard disk lost everything. Not that it mattered, but I couldn't even determine if the problem was with one of the hard disks or the RAID controller.

Update: July 8, 2007. Originally I had said the hard drive was the slowest thing inside the computer, except for the fan. Someone pointed out that optical drives are even slower, so that sentence now says the hard disk is slower than the processor and ram, which was the point I was trying to make.
Note: See the comments on the original posting.

Update: July 13, 2007. See Following up on RAID Level Zero