Here’s the scene:  A nameless employee calls your direct line while you’re on vacation and reports that the file server is “on the fritz”. They are worried about data loss. Should they bring the storage drive over to the tech people while it’s “still alive”? Beads of sweat start to form on your neck, and it’s not from the beachy sunshine you had hoped to bask in, worry-free.

This has actually happened, not just during REM sleep but in the real business world. The idea was that we would move the client’s data to a stable location and back it up before the system tanked entirely.

The questions we needed to ask ranged from the obvious – “Where is your backup?” …To the frustrating: “What about the backup solutions I have been urging you to use for the past 5 years?”

I told the client to bring in the drive immediately.

A week passed.

Then a call came in to my home phone from my business partner. He needed me to get hold of the client right away. It was 8:00PM and their drive had “died completely”.

I phoned the client and got the lowdown: When I had told them to bring it in a week before, it had “magically started working again”. They had moved some of the most pressing files to another machine on the network and just figured that “it’s not going to die”. Trying to avoid any and all costs (as we are all guilty of), they had not yet woken up to reality.

When the machine actually did die (GOOD MORNING, SUNSHINE!), the person on-site panicked and, for whatever reason, ran the computer to the nearest office supply store, (specializing in staples),  where a tech “played with it for a couple of hours” and came to following diagnosis: “The hard drive is dead. We can send it to a lab for you. $500 to look at it, possibly $50K to recover.”

I got the drive into our office. Five hours later we had recovered all of the data for considerably less. Quite considerably less. Like, I-must-be-dreaming-less.

For tens of dollars a month, nearly any small business can have cloud-synced, real-time accessible network storage and backup.

Or you can fly back from your weekend oasis and pay $50,000 for a kinda-sorta fix.

If you do have a backup solution for your business, do you know what it really means for you? How long will it take to recover from a server crash? Accidental deletion of finance records? Your facilities vanish into a wormhole? Okay, maybe not that last one, but even the seemingly smallest of losses can have dramatic – and immediate – effects on the functioning of your company. And unfortunately, over a third of data loss is caused by human error or negligence- that mean’s even the best hardware and software configurations are susceptible to security risks.

I’ve found that more often than not, small business owners are surprised to realize they don’t have the answers to these questions – and probably haven’t thought to ask them in the first place.

Where is your backup? What format is it stored in? How long will it take to recover and, perhaps most importantly, what exactly is recoverable? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, good IT service providers can help you, and find solutions where they are needed.

So find out, before that wormhole creeps up on ya’.

A slow internet connection at the office is a common problem for businesses faced with multiple users and limited bandwidth. Most employees aren’t even aware of how much bandwidth they are hogging, and often enough only one or two tech-savvy colleagues are able to guess what the problem could be when the system comes to a near-halt.

This is especially relevant for companies that had their internet service set up long ago when their 1.5x 512k connection was enough. Since then, they have probably grown, and with increasing size and complexity, added remote backup or FTP hosting. Today’s web services evolve fast, and keeping up with the need for speed – and more users – can be a real challenge.

Problems multiply when users abuse their bandwidth and perform unnecessary (and often unproductive) tasks on work computers. In one memorable instance I arrived on site for a security audit to find not one but two employees running bit torrent, through the company connection, to download…Well, never mind what they were downloading, but it was eating up bandwidth quite ravenously.

Though our country is still far behind such industrial powerhouses as Lithuania, Sweden, South Korea and Romania, bandwidth is relatively cheap and available now.  This does not necessarily mean upgrading is your solution- instead, find out what you have and how you use it. It may be time for a change….And perhaps some house rules for appropriate internet use. 

A customer who wanted to display videos on our monitors – one through a PC we would provide and a second through their own Mac laptop – described themselves as “not technically sophisticated”. This should have been our first clue to be as thorough as possible in figuring out their needs, but, giving them the benefit of the doubt, we went along with their order, failing to ask something as simple as “Will you need audio?”

Luckily, when our techs arrived on site, audio cables were easy to supply and implement. We were also able to help the client with a last-minute download once we realized they needed sound. So far, so good, despite having missed that one tiny little question.

However, when we got around to setting up the Mac with the adapters we had provided, the connection was…nonexistent. We fiddled with the programs, tried a reboot – all the basics, right?

Unable to determine the problem, we provided a second PC, free of charge, so that the client could get their video up and running, sound and all. It was a fix that worked, and the clients were happy with their display, but it required unnecessary travel time for our technicians. The problem turned out to be in one tiny little bent pin of the connecting cable – a glitch that would have been easily fixed if we had started at square one, rather than assuming the worst and replacing the entire computer.

Sometimes…no, oftentimes, it’s that one tiny little detail that makes all the difference in providing the best customer support possible. Starting with the small stuff – whether you’re an expert or not – can save a huge amount of time and energy down the line.

Okay, maybe not, but listen up anyway.

Supposedly in an effort to make your life easier, at least one major U.S.internet service provider has recently made a habit of provisioning their residential customers with “all in one” devices rather than standard cable/DSL modems. Basically, the device that connects your home to the outside world comes with a wireless router built into it. At first glance this looks like a great idea – one box takes care of your wireless and wired routing, in addition to handling connections to the cloud. At second and third glance it often holds true.

So why my slightly testy tone? Because if you have any needs to forward ports, extend wireless capabilities, or simply want to install your own router, these devices, coupled with a certain approach to customer service, make the job unnecessarily difficult.

We are frequently contacted by folks who inform us that Verizon has told them they need to pay for business class service if they want to set up their own router.

The first time this happened, I arrived on site and thought, “Why not just bridge the devices?”  Herein lies the problem, and my chief gripe: When I logged in to the Ubee brand device to make the changes, I was informed that I needed “administrative privileges” to make the change. It took no less than four tiers of support to get someone who “had authorization” to bridge the modem… the first two tiers had no idea what I was talking about.

I have since discovered that Verizon, at least, has loosened up and now allows trained first line techs to bridge modems for folks who want to use their own routers. This is good policy and they should be commended for it. Congratulations.

What I suggest to folks is this: Consider asking your ISP for an installation that allows you to upgrade and modify your router without having to call and ask for permission.

~Daniel Straw, CEO of Technology Rentals of America

Here’s how it works:

Windows has a built-in feature that allows the compression of data on a drive, along with a warning system that alerts you when a drive is reaching its data-storage limits. Sounds good, right?

Many older consumer desktops and laptops were built with what we now think of as “low capacity drives” – 80GB or so. These were adequate for simpler tasks of the past; it was not as easy back then to amass hundreds of photos of half your own face, taken with that iPhone thinga-ma-jig. Gradually, however, these systems begin to slow down and you start seeing warnings about disk space. The warnings become ever more insistent and even offer some guidance: “Click here to remove unwanted files…”

Becoming desperate, you inevitably end up at the properties sheet for the system drive, and the situation goes from bad to worse. In the General tab you see the Holy Grail – the quick, easy fix to all that ails you is just a tick-box away in plain sight, next to the phrase “compress this drive to save disk space”.

Why would you NOT tick that box? Isn’t this just what your computer has been nagging you specifically to do for days? Months? (Hopefully not) years? “FREE UP DISK SPACE,” it begs.

You tick the box, briefly wondering why that beautiful feature is not enabled by default, and hit apply.

Going back to work, the computer has some newly freed space but is still REALLY slow. So what happened?

One of the reasons that this feature is not enabled by default is that when you compress files on a drive, you need to decompress them in order to use them. You also need to recompress as you write them back to the drive. When this is done on a system drive, it ensures that all of those extra steps (which require RAM and disk space) must be taken for every single action.

In extreme cases, the problem is even larger. In order to get things working again, the drive must be decompressed. If the user has continued after the compression to write data (painfully slowly) to the drive, when they try to decompress, they are faced with an error message to the effect that there is not enough free space to do so. Failure…at a glacial pace.

One solution of course, is to move the data to a larger drive and decompress there. There are many others. All of them amount to a great deal of needlessly wasted time. The best solution is always planning ahead.  Never compress your system drive.

Instead? Backup. Backup? Backup!!!

While this reasoning is sound in some instances, in practical application a powerful desktop is a more valuable tool, even as mobile devices become smarter and better connected. The best way to illustrate my point is to tell you how I use my own desktop as a sort of “personal area network server”.

I have a very powerful desktop computer in my office. Back in the pre-touchscreen era, I would often drive to my shop to perform even simple tasks, rather than labor away in my rural home on a slower laptop with low bandwidth.

Now I have a smart phone. I also have a powerful, lighter weight laptop and a superlight net book. If I were so inclined, I could have a tablet too, but that’s another post.

I could be doing the gadget-dance so popular among us humans- set up my smart phone to download my mail, edit documents on my laptop and save the files to cloud storage or a network drive, and use the net book for quick internet access. But despite being office-bound, my super-powerful desktop so clearly dominates these in terms of productivity that I rely on it for everything, wherever I am.

Thanks to evolution, almost any desktop computer with a reasonably fast internet connection can be accessed via one remote desktop protocol or another. Whether you use the built-in (to Windows) RDP client or a paid-for third party client like Logmein, is almost irrelevant. The point is that you can work at that one computer from wherever you are. This centralizes security, storage, communication and scheduling into one place.

Your desktop doesn’t have to be a dinosaur- especially with current customizable options; it can deliver enormous performance at drastically lower costs than some of the smaller technobeasts out there. Now who’s king of the jungle?

~Daniel Straw, IT Specialist and CEO at Technology Rentals of America

We can’t sum up the entire hour of tidbits and comparisons that has us scribbling notes and raising eyebrows, but here’s a few things that stood out:

-Only 10% of consumers have purchased a tablet, but the range of brands and types is expanding rapidly.

-The iPad2 (iOS), a popular, user-friendly favorite, doesn’t have Adobe Flash! What’s up with that?

-The HP TouchPad (WebOS) does play Flash, and has a great user interface. It syncs to Google and has a neat-o wireless charging stand, but was considered “limited but promising”, more appropriate for business use than anything else.

-The Android (Honeycomb) tablets (admittedly, some of our personal favorites) offer a wide range of models, features, and prices, making them versatile for different kinds of users. Their Motorola Xoom was compared to the phone, but with twice the speed. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is super-thin and has a sharp, bright display, but lacks HDMI, USB and MicroSD ports. Lisa’s favorite was the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, which has the option of attaching to a keyboard that not only turns the tablet into something like a notebook, but practically doubles tits battery life. It does not yet have 3G or 4g but performs well with multimedia and runs a fully-functioning Microsoft Office Suite, unlike most of the other models that allow you to view documents, but not edit them. Finally, the Acer Iconia A500 is a more wallet-friendly Honeycomb Tablet with HDMI, USB and smooth Adobe Flash delivery but some problems with high resolution video playback.

-The Blackberry Playbook sounds great- IF you already have a Blackberry phone. Otherwise, you get no PIM apps. Still, it’s fast and intuitive. Note it is Wi-Fi only and has fewer apps than some of these other tablets. But it’s fast, and will be upgrading to 3G and 4G versions next spring.

These were just a few of our notes. Choosing a tablet is a tricky decision, whether you’re interested in it for mobile business functionality, multimedia fun, or just crave  a light-weight on-the-go device. What do you think of the various models out there? While we decide what to buy for ourselves and for our T.R.A. inventory, we’d love to hear from you!

There, you can check out our brand-name and custom-built products, learn about the range of IT services we provide, and even get a quote on a rental. We are excited to offer you smoother, easy-to-use virtual access to T.R.A., and we hope you agree that the new site facilitates even better service.

Whether its repairs, networking, or a special event, T.R.A. has what you and your business need- find it here!

We love customer feedback,- it helps us to provide you with Superior Service Every Time. Let us know what you think

~Tech@TRA

Self-hack? No, just secure access to your remote desktop.

If you’ve ever had a support technician log in to your computer, or worked in an office that utilized multiple connected desktops, then you’re probably familiar with the remote desktop. This convenient virtual connection, once only available in the pages and film reels of science fiction, can now help you and your business run more effectively, whether its intergalactic conferences or pulling up that presentation you left on the kitchen table.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “It would be awfully convenient to access my own home computer from work”?…Or from Vinny’s pizzeria?…The airport?…Or, my favorite, from your car?

As a Class-A IT Road Warrior, I not only have done these things, but need to on an almost daily basis. I even access my PCs from my laptop while moving down the highway at 65mph. (While someone else is driving, of course).

Now, all of this is probably no surprise to most of you, but I am certain that there are those among you who were unaware that most computers, regardless of operating system or hardware, contain everything you need to set up remote desktop access out of the box.

Any competent technician can set up remote access through a standard home router in minutes. Most folks I have demonstrated the process to are surprised at how simple it is…no software or hardware purchases required.

Wanna learn how?

Daniel Straw, IT Business Services

Get help with remote access and more at Technology Rentals of America!