Thinking about moving your small business to the cloud?
Many have and Microsoft’s Office 365 is certainly one of your options – however, it has just been brought to light that there is a limitation on the number of emails you can send out in a 24 hour period.
Wow! this Works!
Apparently Firefox is scaled for dial-up users and someone has found a way to adjust the pipelining to allow for more simultaneous connections and generally faster speeds.
Here’s the fix for slowness opening Excel 2003 files over the network.
A customer recently complained that opening Excel 2003 files over the network drive was very slow and seemed to cause Excel to hang. If you took that same Excel file from the network drive and copied it to the local computer drive the slowness went away.
A search for this type of problem revealed a lot of different answers, however here’s the solution that worked for this customer:
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There is a new rootkit trojan called “Popureb” that Microsoft says will require you to reinstall your operating system to completely remove this rootkit.
[Update: Microsoft now advises using the Windows Recovery Console, however many security experts still advise a complete re-install for a rootkit removal]
“If your system does get infected with Trojan:Win32/Popureb.E, we advise you to fix the MBR and then use a recovery CD to restore your system to a pre-infected state,” – Chun Feng, Engineer, Microsoft Malware Protection Center. (more…)
Before you leave, take a little time and follow these three tasks to prepare your computer, protect your data, and plan for your return. (more…)
Planning on taking some time away from the office and email? Here’s how to create an email as your Out of Office Reply?
If your office is using an Exchange Server then the process is pretty simple, however most SOHO and Small Businesses are not using that technology. (more…)
Windows 7 is the newest Operating System from Microsoft, replacing Vista. It is more efficient than Vista and comes in 3 versions. Which one is right for your business?
| **IMPORTANT! **
Don’t just drop in to your local computer store and buy whatever is there! For maximum effectiveness your business needs the right version! |
Many small businesses, including my customers, avoided Vista as much as possible so they are still running Windows XP Professional. However due to the normal rotation of computers, Windows 7 will be coming in your door shortly.
As in XP and Vista, the version of Windows 7 you want for business is:
Windows 7 Professional.
Why? Windows 7 Professional allows you to do three things the Home Premium version does not:
Unless you have very special requirements there is nothing in Windows 7 Ultimate that you need for business, why pay the extra money? Here’s the official comparison chart from Microsoft: Windows 7 Editions
Mainstream support for Windows XP already ran out in April 2009, extended support runs out 2014. Vista mainstream support runs out April 2012. At some point you’ve got to bite the bullet and upgrade. The question you need to ask is, “What is the best way to upgrade to Windows 7?”
Neither upgrade path is “better” than the other, it just depends on how your office works.
1) Upgrade through attrition
As computers die, purchase the new ones with Windows 7.
For cash flow, this is the most cost-effective way to upgrade. Spend the money when it is needed and work out the wrinkles on the first one or two. In the long term you will probably spend more money due to individual staff training and support costs, but you won’t break the bank.
2) Upgrade office-wide
Purchase new or upgrade all computers throughout the office at one time
All staff can be trained at the same time and prepared for the cutoff date for the transition. Staff can help each other out with questions – efficiencies are gained here. There is a higher up-front cost to this and you may feel nickle and dime’d a bit as some computer components may have to be swapped out, but you will have spent less in the long run.
