Directive Blogs

Have you ever noticed that the vents around your computer seem to pick up a lot of thick dust?  Computers and Laptops house internal fans that keep the inside components from overheating, which essentially makes them mini-vacuums that constantly suck air and dust in.  Dust can act as an insulating blanket and prevent your hardware from cooling, causing damage over time and wearing down your computer faster.  Hit the jump for some more information and some ways to help keep your computer clean so it can live a long healthy life.

Remember in "Mission Impossible," after an agent listens to his secret mission, the recording goes on to mention "This message will self destruct…" followed by the oversized tape-recorder puffing out billows of smoke.

Businesses have gone a long way since then (we've replaced sending tape-recorders with the much more efficient email), and encrypting email messages is easy and cost effective for businesses that want to ensure that certain messages are only seen by certain recipients.

We're asked all time, both by existing clients and during dialog while on boarding new prospects to our NOCOLOGY IT Support Services.  'What exactly is the point of running Windows updates, especially when my workstation or server is running fine?'

We'll cover why updates are so important, discuss a couple ways you can make sure they are always done as well as how we test and prevent "bad updates".

We can never stress enough to our clients how important their data is.  There are plenty of ways data can become lost, but the one scenario that nobody ever likes to talk about is internal data theft.  That's right; businesses can suffer from their own employees stealing data.  Now, this doesn't mean that all or any part of your staff is plotting to expose company secrets or distribute your leads to competitors, but a few precautions can be taken to just ensure that it never happens.

You are running a business. You don't want downtime, you want your email to be as reliable as the sunrise. Google Apps has been adjusting their service level agreements over the years to accommodate to the high demands of the millions of businesses that use their productivity software each day.

Before we talk about that though, I wanted to share an announcement Google recently had. In 2010, the Gmail email service, which provides both free consumer and business email services globally, was available 99.984% of the time. That means about seven minutes of downtime per month on average was experienced in 2010. According to Google, the seven minute average comes from a lot of tiny delays that normally consisted of a few seconds a shot. Most users experienced no issues, and in the rare case they did, a few seconds of delay is pretty easy to miss.

We’re not trying to be negative here. We're not trying to scare you and make you run out and buy a backup device (We’ll save those horror stories for another time). Today we’re going to talk about why hard drives fail. It doesn’t matter what manufacturer your drive comes from, what connection interface it has, who you bought your computer from, and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with the day your warranty runs out (no sir, that’s just a Murphy’s Law coincidence). All hard drives are built in pretty much the same fashion.

Believe it or not, IT companies like COMPANYNAMESHORT work a lot like other businesses.  We have many of the same needs in our business; from accounting to organizing data to marketing ourselves.  As an IT company, yes, we can manage your workstations, servers, and network, but there are other solutions we have up our sleeves that our clients can take advantage of, that just make sense for an IT company to provide, no matter what.

When searching for a word or phrase in a program or website that has hundreds of files it can be quite time consuming. When browsing these files the user might miss what they are looking for in the thousands of lines that they have to look through, causing the search to start all over again. A user can narrow down their search based on what they are trying to find, maybe it is wording that would be in a language folder somewhere. In some places there are multiple language folders, with multiple files in each.

Despite the increasingly vast trust we put into the Internet to keep our personal and business information safe and secure, many users take their passwords very lightly. In an analysis studying over 32 million passwords from RockYou, a company that develops software for social networks, it's been discovered just how little effort is put in to keep things secure. The results are shocking.