Saturday, December 19, 2009

Business Owners Challenge

Want to find out what challenges other business owners are facing? Take this quick survey and get the free report.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

New Podcast Series: PlugdIn

Something I've been planning for some time now and finally launched it!

The PlugdIn Podcast is a weekly discussion with (hopefully) interesting people involved in music, design, video, social media, charities and many other topics.

Here's the link to this week's episode. Enjoy!

Monday, October 12, 2009

Sponsored Posts?

Here's a new twist in a well-defined space. Bloggers are selling posts.

So I wonder what the going rate is? How many subscribers do you need to your blog before you can start selling posts?

Sunday, October 4, 2009

What is Google Wave?

Doing a little research and patiently waiting for my Google Wave invite, I wanted to get a better understanding.

Google Wave is a real-time collaboration platform. The easiest way to describe it would be a blend of Twitter, Flikr, YouTube and Word all in one interface.

It looks to be very early in development and Google is making it open source to accelerate the evolution of the product.

At this point, by just reading about it and watching demo videos, it doesn't seem to have the impact that Twitter or YouTube. But, it will be interesting to get in there and use it and watch it mature.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Connecting buildings via wireless

We highly recommend this product for ease of setup and cost.

The GNS wireless bridge solution is perfect to connect LAN's between buildings that are line of sight. Dedicated 54Mbs link.

Our implementation was up and running 15 minutes after the antennas were mounted.

Friday, May 1, 2009

SPAM VACUUM

How much time per week does your company deal with spam-related issues? Post comments below.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Phones vs. Computers

Here's a question to consider:

What's more valuable to your business; phone service or Internet access? How long could you endure an outage for either?

Post your comments below.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

The 30-minute, 10-point plan to a faster computer

Remove all unnecessary programs.
Go to Start>Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs. Scan the list for programs that you don't use anymore and remove. Be careful not to remove Windows Components.

Delete your "temp files" AND cookies once a week. (Disk Cleanup)
Go to My Computer and right-click on the C:\ drive. Choose Properties, then Disk Cleanup. Check the boxes of the files you wish to delete.

Run defrag every three months.
Go to My Computer, right-click on the C:\ drive and choose Properties. Choose Tools, then Defrag.

Run full HD scan every 6 months.
Go to My Computer and right-click on the C:\ drive and choose Properties. Choose Tools, then Check Disk. Check both boxes. It will do the full scan and fix HD erros on the next bootup.

Stop unnecessary services.
Windows runs a bunch of "services" in the background that may not be necessary for you. Go to Start>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services and stop the following services. Alerter, Clipbook, Distributed Link Tracking, Error Reporting Service, HID Input Service, Remote Registry, Telnet and Telephony (if you are not running Skype or something like that).

Check your error log once per month.
Clues to bigger problems may be found in the error logs. Go to Start>Control Panel>Administrator Tools>Event Viewer and look at the logs. Sort by 'Type' and look for anything with a Red Error label. Make note of these errors and either search them or call a technician.

Minimize the configuration on your virus scanner.
Many virus scanning programs are setup by default to protect everything. You can probably turn some scanning off, like the firewall if you are using the Windows firewall. You can also turn off email scanning if you email provider is scanning mail.

Turn off network and folder autosearching.
This little tip can improve the performance of Windows Explorer. Open My Computer and then choose Tools>Folder Options from the menu. Then choose the View tab and uncheck "Automatically search for network folders and printers"

Reduce the amount of programs auto-staring on bootup.
If you have a ton of icons showing up in the bottom right of your start bar, you can reduce those and speed up boot time. Be careful with this setting! Go Start>Run then type msconfig. Go to the Startup Tab and uncheck the boxes that show Applications that you know you don't need to auto-start.

Clean the registry.
Cleaning the registry and make vast improvements on your bootup and processing speed. However, the only way to safely accomplish this is with a cleaner program. We recommend RegCure.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Outsourced Help Desks

For many companies, hiring permanent IT help is cost prohibitive. Even IT consultants can be a bit pricey. Below is a list of IT help-desk providers.

This kind of service allows a tech in a remote location to connect to your computer or network and troubleshoot problems. Growth for these kinds of services has exploded over the past year.

iYogi.net
PlumChoice.com
Support.com
Greenstar.com