About our Company

Business Types

Services & Support

Contact Us
National Geeks, LLC - Computer Exports of San Antonio, Texas

TESTING LAB

Welcome to my testing site. I have used each of these products personally, and here are my comments.

CURRENTLY TESTING

  • INTERNET EXPLORER 9
    So far, I'm not excited about it because much like Microsoft has done several times now with most of their recent major releasese functions I have uses going back 15+ years just don't work anymore.   Like whats the point of not allowing my toolbars to work anymore like Google, Yahoo and so forth.     There are work arounds, but I don't like work arounds and would rather them stop removing features that I've used for so many many years. 

OTHER PRODUCTS EVULATED IN THE PAST

This page will continue to grow over time, the following products have been used and sold to other customers and to date have proven success for their businesses.   This is a simple list

  • RASS Online
    Remote access with out the need for Citrix, VM-Ware, Terminal Services and so forth at a low cost solution with a high return on investment.

    Comments
    Very easy to deploy, however we found it a little combersome with the general upkeep.  However for the price you really cannot beat it.


The Cisco Umi is a really nice video conferencing device that offers a rich feature set.   It was really easy to setup, but there are hidden costs.   The estimated annual cost is around $200 to $400 dollars for a licenses to use the product so don't be misled by the attractive price for the purchase thinking that will be the end of your costs.   However, aside from the annual cost the price is not bad for delivering such a product to a home or business customers and we found it great for conducting training and all other types of solutions for video chat and video conferencing

Comments:

  1. The device is simple to setup and configure an straight forward

  2. The remote is not very user friendly though, with limited to no real easy way to navigate through the screens or enter the number based ids for users or partner units to call other people

  3. The camera is great quality but we found when audio is turned on that video is patchy even on a high speed connection

  4. If there is a packet filtering firewall in the mix within your environment that does IDS monitoring the Umi may not be a fit with your orginization because of the large number of firewall rules that would be required to all this device to talk with the outside world

Overall, its a great unit for the price with certain draw backs but overal its great.

  • Spin Rite


    • This product is suppose to review a hard drive in order to locate and repair bad sectors in the drive and either mark those drives as bad and even mark them offline. Claims to work with Microsoft, MAC and even your TiVo. Let the testing begin.   This is a product far, far beyond the abilities of your standard Scandisk or ChkDsk from what we've seen so far.   List cost at time of our purchase was $89.00 US.

    NOTE: This product makes NO claims of being able to repair hardware failures, it seems to only look for bad sectors or chucks on the drive and repair them by rearranging the data around the drive. It is estimated at 1-2 hours to scan a 100-GB drive, but our testing shows it could take much much longer.


    Results of Testing: This product is ok, but it did not repair the drive I was trying to test with however that might have been because the drive was damaged beyond repair with a bad block on bit one of the drive itself.

  • All versions of the Microsoft Windows operating systems going back as far as Windows 1.0 to current release.  Yes, we used 1.0 and loaded 37 5 1/4 inch floppy diskettes to just boot the silly thing up.  I'm glad those days are gone.

  • All versions of the Microsoft Office application suite as far back as Office 97 up to current release.    We never had a need for Office prior to 1997 seeing as we did everything with either notepad or text pad, or even the old fashion XBasic. 

  • There are so many different Microsoft products we have used for customers to date and here is only a short list.

    DESKTOP PLATFORMS

    • Microsoft Windows 95

    • Microsoft Windows 98

    • Microsoft Windows NT 3.11

    • Microsoft Windows 4.0

    • Microsoft Windows ME - BAD BAD BAD

    • Microsoft Windows 2000

    • Microsoft Windows XP

    • Microsoft Windows Vista

    • Microsoft Windows 7

      • SERVER PLATFORMS
      Note: there are many different version of the Windows operating system and beyond and we've used them all to date and continue to work with our customers to find ways to streamline and improve preformance each day.

    • Microsoft Windows NT 4.0

    • Microsoft Windows 2000

    • Microsoft Windows 2003

    • Microsoft Windows 2008

    • Microsoft Windows 2000 Small Business Server

    • Microsoft Windows 2003 Small Business Server

    • Microsoft Windows 2008 Small Business Server

    • Microsoft Windows 2011 Small Business Server

      OTHER APPLICATIONS AND APPLIANCES TESTED

      • Microsoft Exchange 5.5, 2000, 2003, 2008, 2010
      • Microsoft TMG 2010 "Threat Management Gateway" Server
      • ZixMail Email Encryption Appliance
      • Postini Email Filtering
      • 3PAR SAN "Storage Array Networks"  - -  Great product! SAN's being SAN's they are expensive
      • Dell Equalogic - Great for small business or fast disk storage stand up
      • Dell Power Vaults - Great for DAS type devices and quick and low cost drive space
      • All Dell server lines to current date;   Power Edges Servers, through the current R series
      • Compaq Storage Array "pre-dates" 1999
      • Many different types of Linksys, Dlink, NetGear and many other SOHO routers and switches
      • Netopia Routers
      • Barracuda Network Backup storage "office site backup"
      • Carbonite Backups "offsite backups"
      • Norton Ghost Standalone
      • Norton Ghost Enterprise
      • Exclaimer - Great email enterprise signature global component.  Used for email branding
      • VM-Ware 3.5, 4.0 and recent.  We love VM-Ware, its expandable and allows for rapid deployment and over management is minimized for hardware.
      • R-Directory - Great product that integrates with Active Directory to help your organization build a robust and easily manageable Corporate Directory to help delicate user account creation, and ownership of executive, management and sub-management to manage their own employees user accounts within their departments taking that requirement off the help desk staff.
      • Solarwinds - I would say this was the easiest solution I've ever deployed for complete and total network hardware and software monitoring across an enterprise.  It was a great experience and I would highly recommend their product to anyone looking for enterprise type monitoring and alerting for their enterprise class data-centers.  There are a ton of tolls that Solarwinds offers, and we've used most of them which they all have their own benefit.
      • Trend Micro Enterprise
      • Trend Micro Worry Free Business
      • McAfee EPO - Not a true fan, their mistake one time crushed several hundred machines we monitored which meant we had to fix them all.   Good for business our business, but bad for the customers
      • Symantec Anti-Virus
      • G-Parted - Great application for partitioning hard drives "beats the crud out of Partition Magic or Server Magic in our opinion"
      • VM-Ware Converter Standalone - Great utility for converting physical computers into Virtual computers.  A must have for anyone trying to move toward a virtualized environment."
      • Microsoft Front Page - Was great for basic web site devolopment for novice users
      • Microsoft Expression Web - Great for basic web site development for novice and semi avanged users.
      • Firefox - Another alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer
      • Safari - Another alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer - MAC's browser of choice
      • Apple iPhone, 3 and most recent - We're standard with iPhones so we know tons.  :-)
      • Magic ISO Maker - Great small utility for creating ISO files to be burned later to CD-ROM or DVD
      • Magic Disc - Great small utility to mount ISO files as CD-ROM's in order to allow you to mount virutal CD-ROMs or DVDs in order to run them on your computer.
      • TextPad - Great alternative to Notepad with a TON of more options and features
      • Quickbooks - Not an expert on this product, but we use it often with many of our small business customers.
      • Setup Builder - Great installation utilitiy that allows you to build your own ISO, EXE or MSI files for application development and distribution.
      • CA "Computer Associates" Backup - Its been YEARS since we've since seen this even in production, but it was a good product back in 1995 at least, but don't know much about it these days.
      • Symantec Backup Exec - Great product for most small businesses that wish to backup to either disk or tape on an automated basis.

        There are several hundred if not thousand of other applications, hardware that we have used, managed, supported, did troubleshooting on, or replaced over the last several years so this list could go on forever.  Just the highlights.   :-)  If you would like to talk with us more about any of the above mentioned products, or our comments please