Simple Family Computing

We are a family of five, ages 20 to 58, who own and attempt to operate eight computers. We face most of the same problems of system, storage, network and security maintenance and vendor selection as a small business.  However, we don’t have the same budget or application profile! 

There is lots of info and advice on the Web and in popular magazines on how to take care of an individual PC, or even how to tend a small peer to peer network with perhaps 3 PC’s. The complexity we face maintaining our fleet has become daunting.  We admit we now have a chaotic computing environment, but we want to move to greater reliability, availability and safety. When something goes haywire here, it’s always at a bad time and eats up a great deal of family time.  We’d really rather be hiking, biking, swimming, watching a movie or even cleaning the garage.  Computer housekeeping is just NOT FUN, and there is way too much of it.  We intend to search for the tools and procedures which will spare us computer housekeeping drudgery in the long run.  When we find out what works, and what doesn’t, we’ll share it here.