[tennis_girl]

I haven't bought the laptop, and it's not for myself.

My older cousin wants a new laptop, so my grandfather has given me the mission of finding him one.

But thanks!

[Mark]

What's cloud computing and thoughts on it?  There is talk about it at work and I haven't the foggiest what they are on about!

For the end user, it's basically about storing more and more of your data and work online. For example, rather than save an important Word document on your computer, have it saved and accessible online making it less likely to be lost with hardware failure and being able to access it from anywhere.

Google Docs is an example of cloud computing. You create a document, spreadsheet or presentation online, save it online, access it online. None of it is stored locally on your computer.

Microsoft also now allow people to save documents on their servers (their 'cloud').

[Mark]

It's a good thing because you're less reliant on a single machine to store important data. What if your laptop is stolen or the hard drive fails? Well, you have backups on another machine hopefully but they can't be kept completely up to date.

By having your data on the cloud, it's being stored on groups of servers that have redundancy that means it's extremely unlikely for you to ever lose any data.

What if you're at an important meeting to show a presentation but your computer fails to work? It's not a wasted meeting because you ask someone else there to login to your account and show the presentation from their machine.

[Mark]

You're making sense to me, thank you teacher   Right, we currently back up to a server (in house I'm guessing) and this would then move to an off-site one.  Are their cloud server buildings located around the world then, that purely do this as a business?

Some of the big companies like Microsoft and Google may have datacenters dedicated to their cloud servers but I don't believe it is necessary. I think any existing datacenters intended for standard servers should be able to cater for cloud computing assuming you lease enough floor space.

For the end user, cloud computing is just a fancy name to describe online storage with decent redundancy an uptime but it's being marketed as some amazing new thing.

[Mark]

Now blow your colleagues away with your new found knowledge of the cloud.

[tennis_girl]

Markie Mark, could you use system restore on a laptop with a virus to get rid of it...?

[tennis_girl]

Viruses can still remain after a restore so just do a proper scan.

I recommend Avast! free edition.

I can't download anything on this computer is the problem with that.

I am so so very ******.

:/

[tennis_girl]

Hmm, restore could help, just depends. Try it for now but make sure you scan when you get a chance.

Would it delete all the files/installations made before that date that you set to restore it too?