One annoying requirement is that you must sign up for a Spiceworks account when you launch the product for the first time. This occurred only on the first launch of the product, however. The initial launch of Spiceworks took an abnormally long time, about two minutes, with the Spiceworks.exe process consuming 50 percent of the CPU usage. Here is where I ran into my only real technical issue. The installation process proceeds quickly from that point and offers to launch Spiceworks when the install is complete. You'll either need to adjust one of the servers to run on a port other than 80 or install Spiceworks on a different machine. This is important to note if you plan to install Spiceworks on a machine that’s already running a web server on port 80. The default is port 80, which is a clue that indicates how Spiceworks will interact with you the software installs the Apache web server. When the installation routine launches, the first screen asks which port you want to have Spiceworks listen on. The file is reasonably sized (about 20MB) and downloads quickly. A single executable file downloads to your computer without you having to sign up for any type of account or provide an email address. You go to the Spiceworks website and click any of the bright orange links that invite you to download and install the product. Installing Spiceworks appears to be a cinch at first. For a comprehensive list of the items Spiceworks can discover and manage, see the Spiceworks Requirements page. Spiceworks’ system requirements are modest the documentation states that a machine with a 1GHz Pentium III processor (remember those?), with 1GB of RAM, running XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, or Windows Server 2008 is sufficient. The network also contains a variety of networking gear from Cisco. I installed Spiceworks on a Windows XP SP3 machine and ran it against a mixed test network consisting of XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X 10.6, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 computers. I reviewed Spiceworks 4.5 from the perspective of someone who has heard good things about the software but doesn't know much about it other than the fact that it’s a free IT management product. You can purchase a version that has the ads removed if you find them to be too cumbersome. The caveat of the software being free is that you have to see ads while you use it-but I found the ads to be unobtrusive. You might have already heard of Spiceworks from a colleague, because it’s reasonably popular for one key reason: It's free. This software includes management, monitoring, inventory control, and a ticketing system, all in one package. One product that aims to solve all of your IT management woes is Spiceworks. For example: Does the tool support all the OSs you use? What about non-computer devices, such as routers and switches? Does the tool take a software inventory from your computers, or just a hardware inventory? How do you obtain technical support if you need it? How much will the product cost you in licensing fees? It's often difficult to slice through vendor marketing-speak to obtain the details you need to determine if a management tool is right for you and your environment. IT management tools are as varied as blades of grass on a freshly mowed lawn.
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