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Directive has been serving the Oneonta area since 1993, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

Tip of the Week: 11 Google Chrome Shortcuts Worth Knowing

When working in your browser, we know how efficiency is extremely important. Like many other pieces of software the developers at Google have baked some keyboard shortcuts to make getting around their browser easier for the average user. Let’s take a look at some of the most useful shortcuts. 

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Tip of the Week: Reopening Closed Chrome Tabs and Windows

How often does this scenario happen to you? You’re going about your workday and are being quite productive, when all of a sudden you close the wrong tab in your web browser, putting an end to your productivity. This isn’t crippling downtime or anything, but it’s an inconvenience that we know you can do without. Thankfully, modern web browsers let you reopen closed tabs or windows to get back to where you left off.

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Tip of the Week: Save Your Documents as PDFs

It’s a great feeling, being able to download something, but also being able to download it as a PDF file. In cases where you want to save something as a PDF rather than its original image or web page file, you can do so relatively easily in order to make printing and other tasks easier. You can do all of this right from your web browser.

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Tip of the Week: Keep Your Android Device Updated

If you use Android mobile devices, then you’ll know that updating your device is routine maintenance to keep it safe from threats and security breaches. Not only that, but updating your device can resolve various bugs which impact functionality. Let’s go over how you can update your device to the latest version of its operating system.

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Tip of the Week: Print Both Sides in Word

How much paper does your office waste on printing, and it’s all because someone printed out a large multi-page document on single-sided paper? It’s very easy to forget to check these settings, but sometimes people don’t even know they exist. Let’s go over how you can print on both sides of the paper and take full advantage of the prime real estate that can be found on the flip-side of your documents.

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Tip of the Week: How to Keep MFA Fatigue from Being a Security Vulnerability

We are major advocates for multi-factor authentication, but it’s also important to understand that it’s not a catch-all solution. In fact, it has forced cybercriminals to be even more innovative to find alternative methods of attack. One method hackers use to gain access to your systems is to use what’s called MFA fatigue to their advantage.

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Tip of the Week: Steps You Can Take to Ensure Your Files are Secure

In today’s business, sharing files is easy and something many workers take for granted. Unfortunately, not all file-sharing methods are secure. When efficiency is prioritized over security, it can often lead to extremely troublesome situations. For this week’s tip, we thought we’d go through a half dozen practices you can take to ensure your files get to where you need them to get safely and securely. 

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Tip of the Week: How to Manage App Permissions in Android

Modern mobile devices are a bit of a double-edged sword for today’s businesses: on the one hand, they are critical for the productivity that is required of today’s organizations, but on the other, they also come with the very real chance of security issues. The permissions you give (or don’t) to these applications can have an impact on this risk.

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Tip of the Week: Retrieving Dismissed Android Notifications

We’ve all accidentally swiped away an important notification on our mobile devices, but not all of us know that Android devices give us the opportunity to go back and check them. For this week’s tip, we’re going to go over the process of how you can retrieve these notifications.

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Tip of the Week: Building Strong Password Practices

Passwords are just one part of a comprehensive security strategy, but they are a crucial one. You must make sure that you are investing adequate time and effort into making sure your passwords are secure. This is easier said than done, but by the end of today’s short blog article, you’ll have all the information you need to craft excellent passwords for your accounts.

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Tip of the Week: How to Turn Off Sticky Keys

Sticky Keys—the Windows accessibility feature that keeps modifier keys like Shift and Ctrl active after you’ve pressed them—have a legitimate and necessary purpose for some. However, those who don’t need Sticky Keys can find them immensely annoying. Let’s go over how to deactivate sticky keys if you don’t need them.

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3 Ways You Can Turn Your Smartphone Into a Great Productivity Tool

Everyone has a smartphone, but only a fraction of people use it productively. Instead of using your smartphone for wasting time, you could be using it to stay productive and get more done, reducing your stress levels and creating a better work life. Today, we’ll give you three useful tips  on how to change the way you use your smartphone.

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Tip of the Week: Modernizing Your Legacy Systems

Updating your technology is one business task that needs to happen if you want to optimize your operations. Some companies, however, still rely on legacy systems that could be holding them back from peak performance. It’s difficult to update legacy systems without comprehensive IT knowledge and proficiency, which is why you have us!

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Tip of the Week: Remove Duplicate Values in Excel

Microsoft Excel is a great tool that can provide loads of value to power users, but oftentimes users just don’t have the know-how to make the most of it. Thankfully, you have power users like us to guide you through some of the more intricate processes in the spreadsheet software. Let’s look at one such process: removing duplicate values in columns.

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Tip of the Week: How to Manage People Better by Using Technology

When all is said and done, being a manager is a far different experience than being an employee. So, when you promote one of your team members to this position—or perhaps you’ve recently been promoted to management yourself—it is important that a few practices are incorporated into their new workflow. Let’s go over these practices, and how the right IT can help.

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Tip of the Week: Getting the Most Out of Your Cybersecurity Budget

Despite hearing about a constant stream of cyberattacks over the past few years—most of which cause millions of dollars of damage to businesses—it might still be difficult for you to justify spending a lot of money on your business’ cybersecurity plans. There is a finite amount of capital to go around and many times CIOs and network administrators will be rebuffed by management when asking for money to spend on cybersecurity. Today, we thought we’d discuss three ways that you can spend on cybersecurity initiatives and not feel like you are throwing your money down the drain. 

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Tip of the Week: Navigating Telehealth

One of the fastest-growing services in healthcare is telehealth. If you aren’t familiar with this concept, it is basically a virtual meeting designed to provide faster and more direct healthcare consultations and stabilize the ever-rising costs of healthcare. With health information being one of the most attractive to hackers, it is important to be mindful to do everything you can to protect your data. Today, we will go through four tips to help you successfully navigate the risks inherent with telehealth.

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Tip of the Week: Altering the Sensitivity and Speed of Your Mouse

If your mouse moves slowly, so does the rest of your computing experience. If you change a couple of settings, you might find that your mouse speed and sensitivity can make a mountain of change for your productivity. Here’s how you can adjust these settings in Windows 10 or 11.

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Tip of the Week: Ensuring Effective Collaboration

In any business, the capacity to collaborate is critical to success. In order to do so most optimally, it helps to carry out a few preliminary and overarching practices. Let’s go over a few such practices to help bring your team’s collaborative activities together.

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Tip of the Week: Saving Time in Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a super useful collection of software that serves the purposes of just about any business, at least to some degree. Since it is so popular—taking up almost half of the office productivity software market in February 2022—we figured it would be helpful to share a few tips to help speed up some of the things you may be spending time on now.

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Our business began its journey with the purchase of a personal computer back in 1992. This purchase ignited a passion with Chris Chase, our CEO, and there was no stopping its momentum. Less than one year later, he had his first IT support client (and...

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