Wanting to fly into “The Cloud”

[FanInAZ]

I’ve been hearing a lot about “The Cloud,” which I understand has to do with storing all of what you’d normally store on your hard drive so that you can access it from any computer. I’m now to where I want to venture into this, but I want what my best options are.

The biggest need I have is to have a portable device that I can fulfill all of my needs for when I’m engaged in various Autism self-advocacy activates. This includes, but is not limited to the ability to…:

1) …connect to a projector when I do PowerPoint presentation.
2) …have immediate access all of my other Microsoft Office & PDF files; as well as the ability to connect to a printer so I can produce hard copies of these files.

My personal uses would be:

1) Storing my personal music collection that I’ve already spent $100s, probably more like $1000s, on all ready and I don’t want to spend more money getting those exact same albums & songs. I just went to Google because I was told that they will let you do this for free (for 20,000 songs). However, what’s the catch & what are the advantages of using other services?

2) Play the games that I like: Civilization, Command & Conquer, Empire Earth, etc. The games that are available on places like “WildTangent” are OK, but their attempt to design games similar to my favorite games fall way short. Their version of Risk is the worst I’ve ever played going all the way back to my Commodore 64. By the way, I’ve no clue as to why “Angry Birds” is such a popular game. Bottom line, I like the games I like & I want to be able to continue to play them. How would I go about being able to do this.

Of course I also question just how safe my personal documents would be from hackers.

[Thnikkaman]

I’ve been hearing a lot about “The Cloud,” which I understand has to do with storing all of what you’d normally store on your hard drive so that you can access it from any computer. I’m now to where I want to venture into this, but I want what my best options are.

The biggest need I have is to have a portable device that I can fulfill all of my needs for when I’m engaged in various Autism self-advocacy activates. This includes, but is not limited to the ability to…:

1) …connect to a projector when I do PowerPoint presentation.
2) …have immediate access all of my other Microsoft Office & PDF files; as well as the ability to connect to a printer so I can produce hard copies of these files.

My personal uses would be:

1) Storing my personal music collection that I’ve already spent $100s, probably more like $1000s, on all ready and I don’t want to spend more money getting those exact same albums & songs. I just went to Google because I was told that they will let you do this for free (for 20,000 songs). However, what’s the catch & what are the advantages of using other services?

2) Play the games that I like: Civilization, Command & Conquer, Empire Earth, etc. The games that are available on places like “WildTangent” are OK, but
their attempt to design games similar to my favorite games fall way short. Their version of Risk is the worst I’ve ever played going all the way back to my Commodore 64. By the way, I’ve no clue as to why “Angry Birds” is such a popular game. Bottom line, I like the games I like & I want to be able to continue to play them. How would I go about being able to do this.

Of course I also question just how safe my personal documents would be from hackers.

I use Google Play for my music. I don't have it all uploaded, but it works very well for me.

As for a gaming service, I recommend Steam. The binaries for the games are not stored on the cloud (that would be impossible given the speed of internet connections these days), but it remembers all the games you own, and you can install them and uninstall them at will from any computer you install steam on. You don't have to repurchase games you already own if you have valid CD keys, just register them with Steam, and there they are. Plus Steam has regular sales on games that you would like to play.

For file storage, you could go through Microsoft and use OneNote to synchronize everything securely. Your other option is Google Docs which has worked well for me in the past. I'm not really up on storing documents in the cloud the way you describe so that research may all be yours to do.