Blog

Backing up your important data

Do you backup your important data? I’m sure that at work, you either do backups religiously, or you have an IT department that do them religiously. But are you doing the same at home?

If someone had to break into your home tonight and take your PC, would you still have copies of your digital photos, music, videos, the list goes on.

The easiest way to backup your data is to an external drive that you can carry with you, because let’s face it, if you leave the drive with your PC, and both get stolen, what’s the point? Continue reading “Backing up your important data”

Success: Technophobe ‘getting’ the iPad

I have a client that for years have been resisting my urges to get up to speed on using a computer.  Mr G* has, for the 13 years that I’ve been involved with his business, been asking his assistant to print any incoming emails, reports, charts.  He would then take his pen, make any particular notes he had to make, and then return the paper to his assistant for digital editing, and replying.

He also insisted that all email attachments, and important emails, be printed and filed (in the killing a small rain-forest fashion) Continue reading “Success: Technophobe ‘getting’ the iPad”

Business uses for the Amazon Kindle

This is most definitely not another review for the Amazon Kindle.  If you don’t know what the Kindle is, please go have a look here for some more information.  In essence, it is the future of paper books and documents.

Now most people will be using the Kindle for its intended use, as an electronic book reader, easier to carry around than an actual book, and it hold multiple books, with the ability to acquire more on the move.

I have heard few people actually thinking of more uses for the reader.

Here is my take on it.  I believe that in the not too distant future, people will not be sitting around a meeting table with a piece of paper in front of them anymore.

Instead they’ll have a device, like the Amazon Kindle, or the Apple iPad, where the required documents for the meeting will be sent to the device by the meeting organiser, and these could be updated while the meeting is ongoing, or just before.

You can easily annotate your meeting documents, and potentially share these notes with everyone in the meeting, without the need to do it manually at a later stage.

Home Networks

We live in an age where most people now have more than one device able to connect to the internet.  From TVs to iPads and Smartphones, not to forget the multiple computers around your house.

We have wired and wireless options to connect all the devices in your house to one shared internet connection, whether that is ADSL, Neotel or 3G.

With the option to track where everyone is connecting to, how much data each device is consuming, and potentially block websites that you think your children should not be accessing.

Contact us now for more information on our home networks.

Testing your backups

Most people know the importance of backups, and probably do them religiously in their businesses. But these same people normally get bitten after the disaster has struck, because they cannot restore that backup.

There could be various reasons.

The point here is that once you’ve made a backup of your critical data, how sure are you that you can actually restore the data?

It is pretty pointless to have your data on a tape or external drive, but there’s no way to restore it. So without ever testing a restore, your backup solution is only 50% done. Continue reading “Testing your backups”

Make sure your hosting provider registers your domain in your name

We’ve been asked a number of times to help people who are experiencing bad service from their current hosting providers.

And a trend we’ve encountered is that a lot of providers will register the client’s domain in their own name.

This means that when you want to move your domain to another host, they could hold your domain for ransom, because legally it belongs to them. Continue reading “Make sure your hosting provider registers your domain in your name”

Some introspection is required, regularly

Last week I was asked by an old friend to have a quick look at their server, because they were experiencing severe performance problems in their Point of Sale system.

Now they’re by no means a large business, with about 35 users on the system at its busiest, but when the shop is busy you can ill afford having your critical systems hold up business. Continue reading “Some introspection is required, regularly”

Tranquil Body Treats

Our latest project, an e-commerce WordPress site has just gone live.  We’re still refining a few of the minor details on the site, but already very proud of this one.  Our first WordPress theme was used here.

Go have a look

You may ask, why use WordPress (essentially a blogging engine), to do an e-commerce site.  The answer is simple, it was the most cost-effective solution for what our client is trying to achieve. Continue reading “Tranquil Body Treats”