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Preparations to install the new server in Creepy Ted's office (Under Development, Shopper 245) have been put back as I have to fit in a trip to Louisiana and Texas. That may sound like fun, but it involves a lot of sitting in airports waiting for planes, sitting in planes and waiting in security and immigration queues. Not to mention the gourmet delights of airline food. Persuading Ted to defer was un morceau de gateau. When I asked him if it was OK, he replied, "When were you going to bring it?" in a distracted manner that suggested we could have turned up two weeks after the appointed time and he wouldn't have noticed. It's nice to have switched-on clients.

I'd usually take my little JVC sub-notebook on a trip such as this, but I need to demonstrate the customer relationship management (CRM) features in the Enterprise Suite to the client's sales team. This uses Microsoft SQL Server plus .NET 2 and needs something with more oomph than the JVC. This is a shame because the JVC is so much easier for travelling.

Eric's not idle

My old friend Eric Cornish travels a lot. He's a business consultant specialising in a particular sector, so he's constantly on the move and only in his office about one day a week. Eric does the sort of mileages I did 10 years ago, but thankfully I've managed to cut down by tele-commuting. Somehow, though, his car never seems to get into the 'lived in' state that mine acquires when I'm

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on the road. Maybe I'm just naturally messy.

We're updating Eric's networks, too, and he's always calling to ask when his new server - which is identical to Creepy Ted's - is going in. This job presents problems as Eric's office is a listed building and we're constrained as to where we can run cables. The obvious solution is to use WiFi, but the building is on four storeys, and getting reliable transmissions through the thick floors may prove a problem.

I consulted wireless sage Dr Souter, who works at nearby specialists Solwise, and he suggested we try those gadgets that do networking over the mains cabling. I'd always regarded them as a gimmick, but Doc Souter was adamant that the latest generation really does work. So, armed with assurances of money back if not satisfied, I bought two HomePlug adaptors. They worked well in our relatively modern office and also over the antiquated cables in Eric's premises, except for an office at the back, which we think is on a different electrical phase so there can be no connection between the ring mains and, consequently, no network communication, either.

Access points

The HomePlug AV units supposedly give us 200Mbit/s between points, which should be more than adequate for the projected volume, especially as we're switching the main mission-critical applications to run on terminal services. Eric's been using a mish-mash of PCs with simple peer-to-peer networking, and one of the PCs (not the most modern one) simultaneously acting as a server and a workstation. The application's based on Microsoft Access and, as more and more users have been added, it's become slower and less reliable, sometimes losing data with network errors. As we didn't write the program there's not much we can do about its architecture, but the authors assure us that switching to a dedicated server with lots of RAM should sort out the speed problem, and using Terminal Services should prevent network errors corrupting data as all the computing is done on the server, too.