Exciting Windows!

Yes you read that right. Yes, Windows, the operating system. It’s time to get excited about Windows. Call me mad if your will (“You’re mad!”), but I believe it’s time to start getting excited about Windows.

Church in the clouds

For those Star Wars fans among you, you might immediately think of Cloud City, but strangely enough(?) that’s not what I’m talking about here (although I’d like to).

In these days of public and private clouds, 3G and 4G data, iPhones and iPads does it still make sense to for churches to have offices equipped with traditional PCs (Mac or Windows) for pastoral staff? Sure for administrative staff, that make sense, but does it for our pastors?

Here at Crossway I’m currently smack-bang in the middle of three IT projects of varying sizes. We’re upgrading our servers (and adding several tonne more storage space), replacing about a third of our PCs (and equipping our media & communications peeps with shiny new Macs), and expanding our Wi-Fi to cover the whole campus.

All of those projects have caused me to reflect, are we doing IT all wrong? Should we get rid of half our PCs and equip our pastoral staff with iPads and get them out of the office to where the people are?

What’s your church doing? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

GodMode and other tips

We have all wanted, at some stage or another, to be master of our own universe and to that end much hullabaloo has been made recently about Windows 7’s super-secret hidden GodMode. If you want to read about it head over to CNet. Interestingly this (and others) also work in Vista (if anyone still cares about Vista). However, much like Jim Carey in Bruce Almighty, for us mere mortals GodMode really isn’t that great. All it really does is put all of Windows’ various settings in one location which, while convenient, doesn’t really endow you with any god-like powers nor expose that hidden setting that turns off all the delays that you just know Microsoft have built into Windows at the request of hardware manufacturers so that you’ll need to buy new hardware. Actually I find it all a bit of a yawn.

If, however you’re looking for some genuine tips to try in Windows 7 check out this series that Stuart of at Church Techy has started.

What about you? Found any good tips, secrets, registry hacks that you’d like to share with the rest of the world? Post a comment and let us know.

IT and the small church office – Part 1: PCs

Buy them. Yeah I know that you’ve got people who want to donate their old PCs to you. But think… if they don’t want them, why would you? Experience has shown me that donated (used) PCs end up costing too much.

On the flip side, you don’t have to spend a bucket load of money either. For most small offices the prebuilt systems you can get from most small computer shops should be your best buy. Check out a couple in your area and see what kind of deal you can get (you’ll be surprised what you can get for around $500 these days).

Just a word of warning… don’t try to save money by getting the “Home” versions of Windows (XP/Vista/7) as some of the network features are disabled.