Technology In Check

I’m still surprised that many people continue to disparage Vista mercilessly. Having just installed Vista SP1 yesterday, I’m now onto my 12th month of running Vista with comparatively few problems. The biggest difficulty I’ve faced in my own experience comes from attaching external hard drives; if I plug in a USB hard drive, and try to use it too quickly, my PC will sometimes blue-screen. Sometimes.

And after I spoke with a friend this last weekend, I heard more about how Vista is “a bad thing”. Continue Reading »

I received a call from a client who wanted help getting a new computer set up and running on their network. They had purchased the computer at a stationary supply chain a few days earlier for a new hire, and now they needed it that person to be able to access the central network.

Nope, not going to happen. The computer’s operating system doesn’t support business networks.

Here’s why IT has more of an impact on your daily operations than you might think, and how a good IT department can save you some real dollars. Continue Reading »

I was visiting a client his week, and I came across a situation that I’ve seen a number of times. They were running a relatively new version of some software, but they were behind a service pack level (they were running service pack 1, and the current recommended level is SP2).

I was thinking about this a bit, and it occurred to me that this is a tendency I’ve seen a few times previously; a tech support provider feels that things are stable and working properly. So why bother to upgrade to the latest service pack? After all, it might break things, right?

Not always. Continue Reading »