First, does the 64 bit version make a difference? Yes, the performance is noticeably faster. Just opening and closing the Office apps alone is faster, as well as using functions within the application. I notice it is especially fast in Outlook, which I use heavily. I have the 64 bit version on my laptop on which I do very little software development and have no need to integrate with other applications. If you can use the 64 bit version of Office, definitely go with the 64 bit.

So who should not use the 64 bit version? Anyone using an Office app that uses external references or API calls to windows. An example is an Access database that is integrated with QuickBooks (and thus has a reference to the QuickBooks library) and it has an API call to get the size of a file. In this case, the API call can still work but your developer needs to change the API call to allow for a 64 bit API call. But the QuickBooks library is 32 bit only and will never work with Access 2010 64 bit. So on development PCs in my office, I only use the 32 bit so that we can develop in Office and integrate with other 32 bit applications.

One other limitation: Some people have tried to install Access 32 bit and Outlook/Word/Excel 64 bit. That doesn’t work either. You have to install either all 64 bit or all 32 bit, but not a combination of the two. The installer won’t let you install a mixed configuration.

I used to do hardware, years ago, and have in-depth knowledge of systems engineering. I know it’s difficult sometimes to trust the guy trying to sell you a new server because of their obvious incentive. I never pushed for unnecessary upgrades, but, now, since I don’t sell hardware anymore, you can know with certainty that I have no vested interest in getting you to upgrade when you don’t need it.

So what is the answer? It depends of course. Anytime you have any mid to high level reliance on your server, you should replace every 5 years. There are some cases where you can go longer. I have one customer with a 8 year old terminal server and this is fine. They aren’t reliant on it. They don’t even back it up. It is basically a throw away. If it fails, they buy a new server and have it up next week. If you have a similar server where, if you don’t get a new one for a week, it doesn’t matter, then you can hold off on the upgrade.

So why 5 years? Actually, at 4 years, you should start allocating your budget, getting quotes, and preparing for the move. If you look at statistics on hardware failures, all of the moving parts (hard drives and fans) and the power supply have the highest probability of failure. The hard drives are the biggest concern. They have a rating on them for mean time between failures (MTBF). It is a rating of the number of hours the hard drive is expected to last. As time goes on, and you exceed the MTBF, you are just playing with probability. At some point you’ll lose. Figure out the cost of being without your email server for 2 or 3 days and compare it to the cost of a new server. It is likely that the cost for the new server is cheaper. Why take a chance?

This summer at one of my clients, their terminal server crashed. All 30 of their users use this terminal server which ran Windows 2003 Server, for their accounting software and other application. The cause of the crash…someone was playing web based games from a website that also installed spyware on the server. It bypassed Symantec Antivirus and took the entire server offline for the rest of the day. 30 people not able to work for an entire day. I had been trying to convince them to upgrade for years. So another reason to have upgraded in this case, is that if they had used Windows 2008 R2 Server, which, like Windows 7, is much more resistant to spyware and viruses, they would not have had an outage.

Always run those Windows Updates and keep your hardware and software up to date.

With the older version on Windows XP and Vista, the setup was cumbersome and involved installing special software off of the internet and registry hacks to get it to work well. Luckily I am a PC guru and it was my toy to get this working. Now things work pretty much out of the box with much less special configuration needed. Any Windows 7 Home Premium or Ultimate PC can be used as a Media Center. If you want to use it as a DVR, you’ll need a Ceton tuner card in your computer to connect the computer to your cable company( http://cetoncorp.com/ ). This card needs a cable card from the cable company and is capable of recording 4 simultaneous shows in HD and even records premium channels. But it doesn’t work with pay per view if that is something that you use a lot.

If you are somewhat technically inclined, you could install one of these cards in a PC and have your own DVR. If you’re not technically inclined, there are companies out there that make custom PCs with this hardware in it, although they are more expensive than your average PC. Companies like www.cannonpc.com.

Hopefully it catches on more and doesn’t fade away as some features for Microsoft seem to do. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to market it much. It is a relatively unknown feature that many people have built directly into their computers and don’t even know it.

I’m hooked. Hopefully more people will be too and they expand the feature set more.

If your system has an agonizingly slow response time, you know it’s wasting employee time. You probably fear it will crash. It could be costing you customers too. Or maybe you’ve had some IT people look into it, but their remedies don’t seem to make much difference.

Systems can be slow for any number of reasons and, as you’d surmise, troubleshooting the problem is unique to each database. Sometimes database are slow because of business growth; it may be time to migrate to a new technology to handle larger volumes of data. Sometimes the problem is too many people accessing the system when it is not sized accordingly, or maybe your hardware is in need of an upgrade.

But most often, time and time again, I find databases are slow because they are structured inefficiently. For example, the program loads all the data for each table when it isn’t necessary. Or the program had so many authors over time, everything is indexed differently or not indexed at all. If you find your problem is due to database structure, make sure you aren’t paying for patches to a program that will later give you grief. In some cases, it is more cost efficient in the short and long term to start anew.

I’ve watched office workers build their day around a slow Access database. Their end users press a button in their database, then they get busy doing some other task to fill up their “wait time,” as it takes 2 minutes for the screen to come back. Crazy.

To be clear, Microsoft Access is a rapid application development (RAD) platform for databases. Access can be used as a standalone database, or as a front end to a larger database, such as Microsoft SQL Server. Using Microsoft Access as a front end and Microsoft SQL Server as the back end is an efficient and secure means of storing data; it is much more efficient that trying to use a file-based Access database by itself which can maybe support only 5 simultaneous users. Plus, since Microsoft SQL 2008R2 Express is free, why not take advantage of it? We have built applications that support more than 40 simultaneous users that connect to a server with Access, SQL, Exchange, file sharing, print sharing, and Active Directory installed on the same server. There are no performance problems. Many developers just do not fully understand its power and capabilities.

There are very few circumstances that I can think of where an Access backend database would be preferable over SQL. Only cases where there are 2 or less people or the portability of having everything in one file is desired. All other cases, a true database backend such as SQL should be used.