As you know, I do this for a living—working on client machines, solving problems, and working on servers—phone systems as well. However, being a network engineer is my livelihood.

With the storm that went through here at the end of November, many people lost power and most machines were not protected with any UPS systems. Those that had UPSes have not checked the battery for several years.

I recommended that they keep them up to date with fresh batteries, however, it takes a storm to bring a system down. Then and only then do people realize that they should have fresh batteries in their UPSes or that they should purchase an uninterruptible power supply in the first place.

As well as losing power at these locations, many people lost their machines as well. They usually just leave their machines on at all times. However, when they came in on that Monday morning, many machines had been rebooted and came up with errors. Some lost their display adapters, others lost their network cards. Most lost their configurations. Needless to say, I was a very busy person that first week after the storm.

One of the biggest problems I have, and the reason for writing this thought in my column this month, is that many people purchase cheap equipment even when buying a computer. What I mean by this is that Microsoft operating systems support many companies with their drivers already built into the system.

For example, 3Com is one of the biggest manufactures next to Intel of network cards. Their cards usually run in the neighborhood of around $40. But you can buy a cheap $10 card from some off-the-wall company that works just as well.

ATI is another big company that makes display adapters. However, other companies sell their cards for as little as $25. Why is this a problem, you ask? It is because, when you need to repair a broken machine, the operating system does not have a driver to fix it locally. You must gain access to the Internet, download the latest driver from the hardware vendor, and load the driver in order to get the card working again. How many people keep driver disks for all their hardware easily accessible in case a machine loses its configuration? Not many!

This happened the other day to a client of mine. Besides many machines losing their configurations from the storm (power surges, sudden power loss, or just plain flukes), one machine lost its network card. When I tried to install the card again, it asked me for a driver. It was a Winbond network card. I found another machine and accessed the Web. I looked on the Web site and found nothing about drivers. I noticed that they made chips that do just about everything, however, no tech support or driver information was found on the page. I could not reinstall the driver. I had to purchase a new network card for this client just to get the machine back up and running.

I actually do not sell products myself. However, in this case, I ran out and purchased it for them and then just charged them on my invoice. If this had been a known brand, I could have just gone to the built-in hardware list on the operating system and had no problems. Time is money. It cost this client much more to get this machine up and running than the little bit extra would have cost when purchasing the card in the first place.

The moral of this story is that sometimes, cheap is not the cheapest. Also purchase known brands and keep with the Microsoft compatible hardware list. It is your best bet.