Directive Blogs

Transferring data between different computers and devices has become a routine task. Let's explore the steps you need to take before ejecting memory from a computer to ensure your data's integrity and the memory card's longevity.

Part of doing business is understanding certain types of trade-offs related to the decisions you make. Specifically, we want to highlight opportunity cost as it relates to technology. What is the opportunity cost of technology, and why is it an important concept for a business owner to grasp?

How can you know when your organization should upgrade its technology infrastructure? The truth is that it’s not always immediately obvious when you should do so, as there are countless factors in play to consider at any given time. Today, we want to help your business determine when to bite the bullet and upgrade your technology.

The laptop is an excellent piece of office equipment due to its portability and its power to meet the needs of most of today’s workforce. When in the office, however, many prefer the much larger screens that are more typical of the traditional desktop. Let’s talk about how you can get the best of both worlds by plugging your laptop into a set of peripherals and using it while it's closed—effectively turning it into a PC’s tower.

If you are old enough to remember when antivirus (like most computer software) came in a great big textbook-sized box at the store, then you probably remember a time when that was the only protection you really needed.

Today, there are countless free versions of antivirus out there. Let’s talk about how much protection these actually bring, and when and where they might be a good fit.

Think about all the things you’ve experienced thanks to the rapid innovation of technology. We can all agree that technology is cool. Today, we have $10 drones, mugs that keep your coffee warm, and LEDs everywhere. 

So what’s next? 

Everyone has their own preferences for their workstation, down to the size of the icons on their desktop. Let’s talk about how you can easily adjust the size of the icons on your display to your own preference.

The use of technology is one of the things that brings most people together. For the past couple of decades people have depended more and more on technology as a way to manage their lives, socialize, and get the goods and services they choose to purchase. This has led to the development of a lot of solid technology-related television shows. In this week’s blog, we thought we would take a look at three shows that cover multiple genres that are solid viewing for the technology enthusiast. 

We spend a lot of time working with the technology that businesses rely on, including the laptop workstations used by just about everyone in many organizations today. As such, we wanted to share some of our insights so that you know what qualities you should look for when you’re ready to acquire some additional devices for your business.

Software makes business run: that is an undeniable statement. From the operations software that allows your business to manage and pay its people to the CRM that provides a pathway to communicate efficiently with customers, to all of the applications that it takes to conduct business in earnest, software plays a crucial role in your business’ success. 

The keyboard that you may very well have used to access this blog is, in a word, gross. While we aren’t going to go into too much detail about what makes keyboards so grimy, we did want to outline how you can easily clean up your keyboard every so often, just to make sure that it’s A: more hygienic, and B: less likely to malfunction at some point.

Magnets are often portrayed as the bane of technology’s existence, especially in media where data must be scrubbed from devices through the use of a magnet. How true is this representation of the relationship between magnets and technology? We’ll examine this in today’s blog article.

It’s easy to open up far more tabs on your web browser than you need, especially when so many tools are cloud-based. If you find yourself in need of a quick way to close all other tabs besides a handful or so, we’ve got just the tip for you. You can close all open tabs to the right of your preferred window, or you can close all tabs outright.

Regularly, when a business is searching for ways to move their operations forward, there is a little hand wringing on how to do so. Every decision your business has to make comes with a price tag, and the more that you can do without spending a lot of money, the more value you are going to see. For this week’s blog, we thought we’d take a look at some actions you can take with your technology to ensure that your business is going in the right direction.

If your business has five or more computers, or an expensive server, then you need access to a professional who can provide technical support. There is a huge difference between a local guy who can fix a computer and a professional who understands the intricacies of a business network—think of it like asking your pizza delivery guy to serve your entire extended family a Thanksgiving dinner.

While using your computer, you might have seen a black box pop up with a blinking cursor in it. This is what is commonly known as the command prompt. It’s helpful for IT administrators to perform certain tasks, but you probably won’t use it much yourself. That said, it’s fun to know what it does and what it’s used for!

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.

Computers allow businesses to do so much, but eventually a time comes to purchase new hardware. Thankfully, you can stave off this need pretty well by simply taking care of your existing technology. Here are some tips you can implement to make sure that your computer lasts as long as possible before it kicks the bucket.

This one is for all of the business owners, C-level executives, directors, and office managers throughout Otsego, Delaware, and Chenango county. I think your intentions are pure, but you might be doing something at work each and every day that is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

Try as we might, we can’t prevent all computer issues from occurring—for instance, there’s not much that we can do if a stick of RAM dies, at least, not remotely. However, if you’re stuck with a broken computer and need to bring it in for repair work, there are a few things we recommend you do.