Tech Bits
By Greg Marshall, CPMR, CSP

Finding Cheap Airfares

Oil Prices are going up. Airfares are going up too (some say faster than oil).

Are you looking for the best airfare? One of my favorite starting places is ITA Software at http://beta.itasoftware.com. They wrote the Orbitz booking engine.

This site is where they try new ideas. You know it’s unbiased since they don’t sell any tickets, just display the fares.

Check out their help pages.  They have a "route language" that lets you specify all sorts of things like connecting through a certain city on a certain airline. And they have a monthly fare display. Say you need to go to Toledo sometime in December for 3 days, but you can be flexible when.  They will show a calendar of the lowest fare each day.  I’ve seen differences of 200% by changing a date by one day.

I then go to the airline website to book and get the booking bonuses.

Safeguarding Your Hard Drive

One-hundred million hard drives fail every year.  I’ve had my share, including one last Christmas Eve. When was the last time you backed up your notebook, your home desktop or work PC?

Right now, 500 gigabyte external USB drives are selling for around $99 to $129 on sale.  That’s enough to back up a notebook and most people’s desktop computers.

My favorite backup software is CMS Products’ BounceBack Professional ($79, www.cmsproducts.com). While Windows has a built in backup program, BounceBack Pro can create a backup drive that can be simply installed to replace a failed drive (obviously you can’t put a 3.5" hard drive into a notebook).

What I really like about BounceBack Pro is it’s the ultimate "nagware." You tell it how often you want to back up and it will nag you to plug in that external drive and do your backups.

So really, when was the last time you backed up?

Gregg Marshall, CPMR, CSP, is a speaker, author and consultant. He can be reached by e-mail at gmarshall@repconnection.com

or visit his website at http://www.repconnection.com.