IT Support

No doubt, solid-state drives are fast, energy-efficient, and long-lasting. Unfortunately for users on a budget, solid-state drives can be too expensive to justify the cost. Here’s some advice on how and when to use solid-state drives (SSD) and how to stretch your budget on this crucial technology. Because SSDs are significantly faster and longer-lasting than traditional hard drives (HDD), I recommend their use whenever the budget allows.  The downside to SSD is the cost. SSD can cost 2x to 10x the cost of traditional hard drives with the premium increasing significantly as the total size of the SSD increases.  A good solution may be to use an SSD for the operating system and program files but use an HDD for your data files. By putting the operating system on the SSD technology, you will be able to boot up much faster and load or change programs at a higher speed.  Your data can reside on the slower HDD drive, and you probably won’t notice a speed difference.  Your IT provider can set program defaults so that your data automatically ends up on the HDD and you don’t fill up the primary, premium booting SSD. It’s worth mentioning that Hybrid drives also exist, but in our experience, they are not a good value. While less expensive than SSD, they don’t provide nearly the same benefit because you are very limited in the solid-state part. The drive logic decides what data goes on the SSD, taking control away from you. My advice is to buy the largest SSD you can practically afford. If you can have your operating system, programs, and when possible, the data all on the SSD, the speed and reliability of the technology will justify the expense. 

Technology is great. I believe in its development and use to the benefit of all humankind. However, there is a real danger that we are losing our ability to communicate with each other because of the way cell phones are way overused.  I’m sure you’ve seen the scenario. A set of parents with their two children are out to a nice family dinner at a restaurant. Rather than talk, they are all on their phones accessing social media or texting friends. It’s not just the kids; it’s adults as well. People are on social media and texting others instead of talking to one another. They are using cell phones at the dinner table instead of having a conversation with the people they are with.  We see this in families, couples, and friends that are out to dinner, at social gatherings, even while they are walking around!  Sometimes the behavior is just rude, and they are disengaged from those they are with due to a lack of respect or lack of interest. Other times it can be caused by a condition called FOMO, or Fear of Missing out. Psychology Today has an article that describes experiments done to prove that a Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a real and valid condition. The article continues to say that FOMO has become prevalent among young adults across America and in many other parts of the world as well. If you think it’s not really a thing, I’m sorry to say that it is. The American Addiction Center, LLC, a leading provider of rehab for addicts, has a website called PyschGuides.com on which they have published an article “Signs and Symptoms of Cell Phone Addition.”  I’m not the only techy to pick up on the dangers of excessive smartphone use.  Check out this article on the popular website, PC Mag. If this sounds like you, your family, or your friends, I urge you to get cell phone use under control and be present with the people you are physically with.

Who doesn’t love their email?  Ok, maybe love is a strong word, but we all tend to save a lot of email, don’t we?  How much is too much and what are the risks of letting Outlook grow out of control? This article assumes you are using MS Outlook so the steps may be different for you, but the same general principals apply to any email program. Depending on your version of Outlook, you may be well below the technical limit which, by default, is 50gb in Outlook 2013 and higher. From a practical standpoint though, you will have a much better experience, and much better hope for recovery from outlook data file corruptions if you keep your outlook file much, much smaller than that. We recommend keeping outlook to less than 10gb in size. When the outlook data file is larger than 10gb, it is going to be much harder to back up and take much longer to scan for errors if you encounter a problem. I’ll cover how to scan your Outlook data file for errors in a later blog entry. For now, though, know that it is something that can happen due to disk errors or data corruption from sudden power loss, etc. This past week I helped one of our users with a data file that was close to 48gb in size. Her outlook file had become corrupt and would no longer properly send/receive email. I started the scan at noontime and was checking on it throughout the day. By 11:30 at night it had been running nearly 12 hours but was still not done!  She could not access her outlook file while it was scanning, which was a significant inconvenience for her. If your organization doesn’t have its own MS Exchange server, your outlook data file is most likely stored in .PST format. This file is vulnerable to data loss because a copy of its contents does not exist anywhere else. It’s important to make a copy to another location such as a memory stick or external USB drive. It’s going to take a long time to copy the file if it gets much bigger than 10gb so the risk is you won’t take time to do it or you won’t back it up often because you can’t have outlook open during the copy. Finding the outlook data file can be tricky. Here’s how to do it: With Outlook open, click File, then Account Settings. Click the Data File Tab. Click Open File Location. In the list of files presented (see image at right) right-click the image and then click properties. Viewing the properties of the file, you will see how large it is in megabytes or gigabytes. You will want the PST to be less than 10 gigs in size. As you can see from my file, at right, I am just under the recommended limit and will need to archive soon. For now, though, I can copy the file to a USB stick or to my file server to back it up. Close the properties window and from the data file folder shown, you can right-click and copy the data file to another location such as your USB stick, an external USB hard drive, or a network share. Remember: It’s important to keep this file backed up because it is going to contain data that no longer exists on the servers of your email host.

This week, one of our managed services customers sites went down due to a power failure. The site has a backup generator, but guess what? Their generator failed to start! While there is not much we can do for a customer that is entirely without power, there are things we have in place to get clients back up and running, the moment stable power returns. As soon as I received the notification that the power was down at the site, I knew something had gone wrong because I knew the site had a backup generator that should have automatically engaged within 30 seconds of a grid power loss. Except for this time, it didn’t kick on! I spoke with personnel at the site, and National Grid will not restore power for at least six hours. Downtime is extremely costly for this organization, so I immediately broke my schedule and headed to their location. Our plan was simple. We would get the servers back up and running as soon as power was restored to the site. At the time, we weren’t sure if it would be National Grid or the generator that would come on first, but one thing was for sure; downtime would be minimized as much as possible with this strategy.  All we needed was for power to come back and charge the battery backup systems to a safe level. I was confident that the information systems could quickly be brought online once the power came back because we had configured the battery backups to report to the servers that they were low on energy and that the servers should perform an orderly shutdown. Having this failsafe in place minimized risk by limiting the possibility of corruption of the server’s operating system. To summarize, there are a few things you should keep in mind when it comes to battery backups:  First, they are not intended to be a substitute for grid power or in place of a generator. Battery backups are not sized to be a long-term solution, but merely a stopgap intended to run the IT systems while you get your generator started or perform an orderly shutdown of your servers.  Second, UPS systems help you avoid sudden failures due to momentary blinks and brownouts. Third, when properly sized and configured, the UPS will send signals to your equipment to turn back on once the battery has recharged enough that it is safe to go back on the grid.

If you’re like me, you meet a lot of people and end up collecting a lot of business cards. Several years ago, serious business networkers had to have a special scanner for scanning business cards effectively. With our smartphones so powerful, and with such great cameras, there’s an app for that! Specialized card scanners are still around. Cardscan is probably the best and most popular, but I’m going to show you an application I use that only requires my phone’s camera. The app is called CamCard, and the screenshots I’m showing are of the application running on my Android phone. For my first example, I’m scanning Joseph D’Eramo’s card.  Joe is an outstanding copywriter with PR Works, a public relations firm in Plymouth Mass. After taking a picture of his card, CamCard immediately went to work parsing the image into recognizable fields and presenting it to me on the screen for editing. In the image above, on the far left, you can see the scan of Joe’s card along with the result.  From here, you can proofread the card for accuracy. As I touch into each field, the card app zooms in on the area of the scanned image to show you where it got that information from.  In the second photo, I clicked on Work phone, which shows me it obtained the data from the Direct Line section on the card. Next, I clicked on Website, and it zoomed right into www.prworkzone.com on the card photo so I could make sure the web site address was right. Joe’s card was relatively easy; it had black text on a white background, and the recognition was near 100% accurate. Now, watch what happened when I scanned Tom’s multi-colored card.  Tom is an expert security consultant with Beacon Protection and provides excellent burglary protection, video surveillance, fire and smoke monitoring, and access control systems for homes and businesses. Pictured below, the app created an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enhanced version of the scanned card and used that rendering to parse the data into the correct fields. CamCard preserved the original image, which I show on the right, below. As you can see, CamCard had no problem at all parsing Tom’s card, even with its Yellow, Black and white colors. The application will let you keep notes on each contact too. I’ve gotten myself into the habit of including a memo that has the date and venue where I met the contact. I’ll often fill in details that will help me remember what they do and how they can help my contacts so I can refer them in the future. Once you’ve got the card scanned and proofread and save it, the contact details will be synced with your phone. You can then call the person or email them immediately if you like, without any extra steps to import the contacts. It’s also important to know that you can share the business card via email very easily. The recipient will get an email with the contact details (shown at left, below). If the recipient clicks the link at the bottom of the email message, they can view an image of the card on the CamCard site (shown at right, below), If the recipient is also a CamCard user, they can click Save to CardHolder to save it to their account. There are other apps and tools that you can use to scan cards, but CamCard is my favorite and lets you scan up to 500 cards without having to pay for a subscription.  You can download CamCard for your Android or iPhone from your phone’s Store app, or directly from links you can find on the CamCard web site.