This was a great opportunity for me to find out what it is like to have to survive without IT of any kind.

I had to hand over my laptop and my Nokia N71 smart phone. When I handed them over I was lost and it made it hard to work as almost everything that I do is based online.

All in all giving up Technology for 48 hours was an excellent opportunity but not something I will be doing again soon.

Mark

Do you think you or your company will make the big leap and get on the Windows 7 wagon?

If you are working from home for a company you will need to connect into the corporate network over a VPN connection. This is a secure connection that connects you into the office network and will let you access all of the resources on the office network.

If you are working from home only part time and you have a computer in head office, an alternative to using a VPN would be to use an application like logmein to connect to your head office computer. This would mean that you were able to work on the head office computer from home. This is something you would have to talk to your IT service department of company about as there are some security issues with this solution.

Some companies are now using Virtualization to improve the IT services that they are providing to their users. This means that you would be able to connect to a virtual computer and do your work from home with your laptop or home computer or even if you are out on the road.

If you are working from home and you have broadband in your home office, I suggest that you sign up for a VoIP telephone service.  There are many VoIP service providers and Google search will provide you with a good selection for your country. Large companies who have employees working from home provide them with VoIP phones to work from home with.

 
Another point to consider if you are using your home computer to connect to the corporate network, is that it is important to make sure that you have good Internet Security. I use Eset Nod and I would recommend this to my customers, as it provides excellent cover.

In addition, you need to have a system in place to backup your data if you are working from home. This is crucial. For people working from home, I recommend online Data Backup;if you would like some more information on this drop me an email.

E-mail has become indispensible now and if you are working from home you will need an IT service provider that will let you access your mail on your computer, online and on your mobile. If you work for yourself and are just starting up, I would suggest that you use the Software as a Service (SaaS) provided by Google Gmail for Business. This IT service will let you use Calendar, Chat, Blackberry sync etc. Your company may already use Microsoft Exchange to provide it’s e-mail service and you will need to contact your IT service provider to set your account up so as you can work from home.

For more information on working from home and the required IT services just give iPing a call.

Once they have worked out how many prints you are doing per printer, they need to find out how much you are spending on toner for each printer. This is the place where the real cost of printing sneeks into your printing budget. From my experience and from doing this research, the cheaper the printer that you buy – the more expensive the toner for this printer will cost. You may even find that some of the companies that sell you a printer will only let you use their printer toner in the printer. This is something that really grates, as they can charge what they like for this.

Another point to look at here is how much you are spending on geting your printers serviced. On completion of the print audit, having identified how much you are spending on printing and how many prints you are doing per month, in colour and black and white, the company will make a proposal to you that you will pay them an average cost of say less than 1c per black and white print and less than 6c per colour print.

• From my experience toner will generally cost you more than this alone.
  The key advantages of having a good external company provide you with a print service and the points you should be looking for are as follows:
  If a printer breaks down the company will fix it the next day or replace the printer.
• The total cost of your printing will drop by between 20% and 40%
• The company has a good print management software that lets them know when to send you toner before you know you need it and it just arrives.
• You know in advance how much your printing costs will be for the next few years so you do not get any shocks.
• The print management software provided by the company should give you the information to really streamline your printing service and help with total savings.
• By pooling printers in an office and using printers approprate for your office size you will find that the printing experience of your users improves.

There are some questions and matters to look out for when selecting a print service and they are as follows:

• What are the costs if I print above or below my monthly or yearly quota of prints. A good company will give you a rate nearly identical to what you have in your contract.
• If for some reason you need to remove some offices or printers from the contract what will the cost of this be. Again a good company will be flexible here.

If you are based in Ireland or around Dublin and you are interested in the idea of having print service, please contact someone here at iPing as we have some good companies we would like to put you in contact with.

Until next time,
Mark

I have been reading all the hype out there about the new Apple iPad and I was wondering if any of you will be running out to buy one?

Over the years I have not used Apple products all that much and we would only provide support to our clients who use them.

I have a feeling that the iPad will be a big hit among graphic design studios, PR companies and some web developers but do you think there is much point getting one outside of this area?

Let me know your thoughts my Apple using friends :)

Mark

After the nightmare experience so many people had with Windows Vista on it’s release; it is no surprise that people have been waiting for positive reviews before trying Windows 7. So let’s get cracking and have a look at three of the features of Windows 7 that have really impressed me.

 1. Improved Speed over Windows Vista

 One of the big problems experienced with Vista was the speed at which it performed; so this was one of the big challenges that the people at Microsoft had to address. They did this by redesigning how Windows 7 displays graphics to your monitor.

Windows 7 can not start to display things before all the background information is worked out. So you do not get that feeling that your computer is freezing. This change has reduced the wait time for applications to load, save and respond to users’ requests. How this was achieved is not important, what is however important is the fact that this feature really improves usability in Windows 7 over Windows Vista. 

 2. Home Networking & Media

It is no longer the case that people just use a network in the office, therefore Microsoft have really catered for the home network in Windows 7. The ease at which you can now share your files between computers in your network will surprise you. It is also so much easier to connect printers to your home network and also to connect to your home Wi-Fi connection.

There are loads of new features in Windows 7 to make it easier to share all your MP3s, Videos and TV shows throughout your house by using your home network in Windows 7. You can view music or recorded TV shows from remote computer and play them across the home network. If you want to watch a recorded TV show, you can easily transfer it to your laptop so that you can watch it on the laptop at another time.

 3. Not So Many Annoying Pop-ups

One of the things that really annoyed me about Windows Vista was the fact that when I wanted to do anything with my computer I got a pop-up box asking me if I was sure I wanted to do it; also if an application was looking to do something we got the same pop-up. These constant pop-ups became really quite frustrating. In Windows 7, Microsoft have introduced a setting where you can adjust the settings to reduce or switch off these annoying little pop-up boxes.

 My experiences with Windows 7 are all positive and I will be suggesting to my clients based in Dublin to consider installing Windows 7 on new PCs.

If you would like to talk to someone in iPing about Windows 7 or your IT support in Dublin please drop us a LINE

Dublin really is a small village in terms of providing IT & Computer support and that is why it is so important to provide a high quality service at a price that companies feel is fair.

The iPing team provide support for your computer network; our engineers will support and design your network so that it will do what you want and need it to do and more.  Another important part of our aim to provide great support in Dublin is our ability to provide our customers with a quality phone solution.

By being an integrated point of contact for companies in Dublin for their computers and their telephones, we aim to provide companies with Total Network Peace of Mind. So if your company is looking for Total Network Peace of Mind just drop us a LINE.

If you have had Windows installed on your computer for quite some time and have installed and uninstalled lots of applications, it is likely that your registry is also in need of a fine tune and this is another function of CCleaner.

CCleaner will also help you to find free space on your computer by cleaning the recycle bin, memory dumps, file fragments, log files, system caches, application data, and various other data from your computer.

I advise you to run CCleaner with the default settings if you are planning on using it to tune your PC. To download CCleaner go to this website.

CCleaner is just one of the many tools iPing engineers are using to provide you with Total network peace of mind. If you would like us to have a look at your Network just contact us  iPing provide IT & Computer support in Dublin & around Ireland.

Each computer that is running inside of the main server is called a virtual machine and each virtual machine is independent of the other virtual machines running on the same server. 

Being able to run many computers inside of one computer or server can offer businesses many benefits in today’s competitive environment and helps to give companies the edge over their competitors. Some of these advantages are:

Massive savings in power, hardware and administration costs as businesses no longer require a server for each application, thus the sheer volume of servers a business requires can be dramatically cut.

Every virtual machine is independent of the hardware it is running on. This is possible because each virtual machine is essentially a large file and can easily be moved from one location to another.  Transferring these files can be achieved over the internet, by saving it on a hard disk or even on a USB key. Once the file is in the new location it can be installed as a new virtual machine.

This process of moving the virtual machine can happen very fast over the internet. This lets us: (a) Move virtual machines off our servers for hardware maintenance (b) Move our virtual machines to more powerful servers as needs require. This could be during busy periods or if the demand has risen.

It is important to note that virtualization is not limited to servers. Many companies are now running a virtual machine for every employee that is working in their company. This virtual machine is then configured in one central site and the employee connects to the virtual machine using a standard PC, Laptop or a thin client.

The advantages of desktop virtualization are increased security; reduced hardware costs and a reduction in the management time required.

If you would like to talk to iPing about Virtualization just contact us. iPing provide IT & Computer support in Dublin & around Ireland.

Through general use of a computer you save, delete and create files, these can be Microsoft office files, music files or even big video files. You also install & uninstall programs from time to time on your computer. By doing this over a period of time, you use space on your computer’s hard disk and it starts to become fragmented i.e. small spaces on your hard disk start to appear that are too small to hold a single file.

When your computers hard disk is fragmented, your operating system saves files in different parts of the disk, as a result your computer will run slower when you are working on this file at a later stage.

Once a month you need to defrag your computer, so as to bring all the file blocks together on your hard disk for similar files. When you do this you will be able to access your files quicker and your computer will run better.  

Recently I have been using Defraggler www.piriform.com/defraggler to defrag my computer and I suggest that you should use it once a month to help tune your computer.

For more info drop us a line Here. iPing provide IT & Computer support in Dublin & around Ireland.