It never ceases to amaze me how certain people are quite happy to pass issues with technology over to other people to deal with, almost ready to shut technology out, without try to get to grips with it or at least have a go.
Now, while I understand this for particularly complicated tasks, there comes a point that we all have to try things for ourselves, we may surprise ourselves with the results, and we may even enjoy it!
By way of example, I am regularly surprised at the amount of people that won't change the toner in the colour printer we have at work. It's one of the simplest things to do, and is as easy as loading paper in the tray. The cartridge is a tube, you twist it and pull the old one out, then slide the new one in and twist the tube to lock it in. Job done.
However, quite a few will not do it, and expect the I.T. Dept to handle it. Often this requires us to stop doing something complicated (which most of the staff CANNOT do) just to slide a new cartridge in.
It makes me wonder why people really hand over the job. Is it because they really cannot understand how to do it, or is it because they are just lazy?
Sadly, these ones are likely sharing a similar view on other tasks through life, and will often pay for somebody to do a job that they could quite easily manage themselves.
Maybe I should charge for changing the cartridges. Now there's a thought.
Thursday, 24 May 2012
Wednesday, 23 May 2012
Space, The Final Frontier (Or, I Feel The Need, The Need For Speed)
Bit, bytes and nibbles. Not a restaurant review. They are all technical terms used to describe size, and it's worth understanding as they turn up in pretty much all aspects of computing.
A bit is the building block. It is the 0s and 1s that computers work with.
A nibble is 4 bits, but you'll barely ever hear it used outside random blog posts on the web.
A byte is 8 bits. It's how much space is needed for one character. So the letter A takes up one byte of space.
A kilobyte is not 1000 bytes but is actually 1024.
A megabtye is 1024 kilobytes.
A terabyte is 1024 megabytes.
So, pop quiz, your 1TB drive can contain how much data? 1024 x 1024 x 1024. 1,073,741,824 bytes or characters worth. Otherwise known by most people as 'large'. If it helps give you a sense of scale, the Encyclopaedia Britannica comes in at about 224,400,000 characters. So nearly 5 of them.
This whole area also impacts internet connection speeds. Let's say your provider quotes you 8Mb/s. That's 8 megaBITS, not bytes, a second. Going by our equations above, that's actually 1 megaBYTE per second. Some software or websites that report connection speeds report them as megabytes and the blood may drain from your face as it appears you're getting one-eighth of the connection speed you expected.
For many who have been involved in the computer world for some time, they were happy that their 80MB hard drive would never get full. Now TB drives are becoming the standard and my mobile phone has more memory than my first three computers combined.
Now excuse me, I have to go for my afternoon nap.
A bit is the building block. It is the 0s and 1s that computers work with.
A nibble is 4 bits, but you'll barely ever hear it used outside random blog posts on the web.
A byte is 8 bits. It's how much space is needed for one character. So the letter A takes up one byte of space.
A kilobyte is not 1000 bytes but is actually 1024.
A megabtye is 1024 kilobytes.
A terabyte is 1024 megabytes.
So, pop quiz, your 1TB drive can contain how much data? 1024 x 1024 x 1024. 1,073,741,824 bytes or characters worth. Otherwise known by most people as 'large'. If it helps give you a sense of scale, the Encyclopaedia Britannica comes in at about 224,400,000 characters. So nearly 5 of them.
This whole area also impacts internet connection speeds. Let's say your provider quotes you 8Mb/s. That's 8 megaBITS, not bytes, a second. Going by our equations above, that's actually 1 megaBYTE per second. Some software or websites that report connection speeds report them as megabytes and the blood may drain from your face as it appears you're getting one-eighth of the connection speed you expected.
For many who have been involved in the computer world for some time, they were happy that their 80MB hard drive would never get full. Now TB drives are becoming the standard and my mobile phone has more memory than my first three computers combined.
Now excuse me, I have to go for my afternoon nap.
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
Bespoke too Soon
Its often a challenge for any business to make a choice over which accounts software they should invest their hard earned money into. There are so many packages out there, surely one or another will fit their need?
I think the problem that most companies face, is that when they start trading they don't have a working procedure in place that has been set in stone. This will come in time, but isn't immediately available from the beginning.
As time progresses, a system is developed that the staff are all happy with and the company will grow and it's procedures will increase in speed. During this time, however, is where a company will start hitting the limits to the Accounts software that they invest in.
What are the choices? What can a company do if they find that their operating environment is being inhibited by the software? Bespoke software is the answer.
An off the shelf program is ideal for smaller companies that may not already have a working process in place. This will mould your administration into a process, a way of working. However, you may soon discover that it won't do what you want, and this is where a bespoke system comes into play.
With a bespoke system, the development team will analyse your entire working environment and build the software around that. The benefits are that the computer will work the way that you do, and not the other way around. In most cases additional developments later on can be added to the original program and it can grow and shape the way that you want it to.
So there must be pros and cons to these two systems, or everybody would get bespoke, surely?
Lets look at those now:-
Off the Shelf
Pros
Pros
I think the problem that most companies face, is that when they start trading they don't have a working procedure in place that has been set in stone. This will come in time, but isn't immediately available from the beginning.
As time progresses, a system is developed that the staff are all happy with and the company will grow and it's procedures will increase in speed. During this time, however, is where a company will start hitting the limits to the Accounts software that they invest in.
What are the choices? What can a company do if they find that their operating environment is being inhibited by the software? Bespoke software is the answer.
An off the shelf program is ideal for smaller companies that may not already have a working process in place. This will mould your administration into a process, a way of working. However, you may soon discover that it won't do what you want, and this is where a bespoke system comes into play.
With a bespoke system, the development team will analyse your entire working environment and build the software around that. The benefits are that the computer will work the way that you do, and not the other way around. In most cases additional developments later on can be added to the original program and it can grow and shape the way that you want it to.
So there must be pros and cons to these two systems, or everybody would get bespoke, surely?
Lets look at those now:-
Off the Shelf
Pros
- Can be cheap
- Will already have a working system environment in place
- Will have a lot of support by other users who can help and train where necessary
- Where accounts and government interactions are required, will meet the required standards.
- No Flexibility
- Limited functionality
Pros
- Flexible
- Will fit your business operations like a glove
- Will grow and change as you require
- Will provide all the necessary tools that you require
- Can be expensive
- Development can take months or years
- System is not always transferable as it's designed for you.
Wednesday, 18 April 2012
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz...
When it comes to the end of your computing day, you have a number of options. You could leave the computer on and walk away. That's not really viable as it continues to take power and will significantly shorten the life of your components.
You could put it into sleep mode. Sleep is considerably faster to come back from than a full shutdown and needs less power, but not no power. Sleep effectively writes the state of your computer at that moment to its memory and then shuts everything else down. It must still be powered though, whether by mains or battery, so that the memory can retain the information. If you're only stepping away relatively briefly, but long enough to warrant a state-change, then sleep is probably the way to go. Interestingly, Macs go to sleep, rather than full shutdown, by default.
Hibernate is another option (in some systems). As its description suggests it is like sleep, only more so. Hibernate saves the computer's state, but this time to the hard drive rather than the memory. That means it takes essentially no power to maintain but does take a significantly longer time to boot back up. If you feel you can live without hibernate in Windows, then switch it off as it reserves a chunk of hard drive space that you can claim back if you don't use it. Microsoft tells you how.
Then, of course, there's shutdown. This closes all the windows, locks all the doors, gives the place a quick vacuum and leaves a note for the milkman. Windows especially needs a shutdown occasionally. If any programs have been updated, particularly Windows itself, there may be specific files that cannot be updated until they are no longer used, and that's only going to happen after a shutdown.
So at the end of your computing day choose your method and both head to the land of sleep. Or indeed hibernation.
You could put it into sleep mode. Sleep is considerably faster to come back from than a full shutdown and needs less power, but not no power. Sleep effectively writes the state of your computer at that moment to its memory and then shuts everything else down. It must still be powered though, whether by mains or battery, so that the memory can retain the information. If you're only stepping away relatively briefly, but long enough to warrant a state-change, then sleep is probably the way to go. Interestingly, Macs go to sleep, rather than full shutdown, by default.
Hibernate is another option (in some systems). As its description suggests it is like sleep, only more so. Hibernate saves the computer's state, but this time to the hard drive rather than the memory. That means it takes essentially no power to maintain but does take a significantly longer time to boot back up. If you feel you can live without hibernate in Windows, then switch it off as it reserves a chunk of hard drive space that you can claim back if you don't use it. Microsoft tells you how.
Then, of course, there's shutdown. This closes all the windows, locks all the doors, gives the place a quick vacuum and leaves a note for the milkman. Windows especially needs a shutdown occasionally. If any programs have been updated, particularly Windows itself, there may be specific files that cannot be updated until they are no longer used, and that's only going to happen after a shutdown.
So at the end of your computing day choose your method and both head to the land of sleep. Or indeed hibernation.
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
The Big Debate: Revisited
At the end of last year we discussed The Big Debate, the differences between PCs and Macs. The conclusion was that there couldn't be a conclusion, the choice is personal. However, to add some more detail to assist in making a decision, we're writing this post after having purchased a Mac.
To reiterate points made in the original post, the hardware and software are both designed and built by Apple and therefore play very nicely together. There is no separate tower with the iMac, everything is contained in the monitor. A nice touch, but not unique to Macs. The monitor is a thing of beauty and looks very nice on a desk. The keyboard and trackpad are very well built. So far, so good.
The ordering process gave an interesting insight into Apple's pricing. To add 4GB of memory on top of the 4GB already provided would have added an extra £160 on to the price-tag. Having set the iMac up, we sourced an extra 8GB of memory from Crucial for less than £35. It may be true that Apple makes good quality products, but don't be under illusion about how they have made the phenomenal amounts of money they have.
OSX, the operating system installed on all Macs, is very nice. Not spectacular, not life-changing, but very nice. Most things you can do on Windows you can do on OSX. Some slightly different methods have to be learnt but no show-stoppers. OSX seems to come with more software pre-installed than Windows, including iMovie and Garageband which are great fun and add to the glossy reputation that Apple products have. The vast majority of programs that I used on Windows have equivalents on the Mac. Most are identical as Macs are mainstream enough for companies to write for. Occasionally you have to go looking for third-party equivalents but again, no show-stoppers. In a worst case, it is possible to install Windows on a Mac, either in its own partition completely separately from OSX, or within it using virtualization software like VirtualBox which works brilliantly. However, if you don't have to, don't. A friend of mine said it was 'like putting a Metro dashboard into an Aston Martin.' Harsh, but it would certainly take up unnecessary space.
At this point it's worth pointing out that not everything went smoothly in the transition. The scanner on the multi-function printer didn't work straight away and is still flaky. And OSX would not perform a Software Update for the first 48 hours. A lot of research later and things were still not resolved until one morning it just started working. I take it the issue lay with Apple's servers but who knows. It was a valuable lesson in the fact that things don't always 'just work'.
So the conclusion? Pretty much what it was - it's all about what you want the machine to do. The Apple range is slick, but not perfect. Windows offers a little more range and flexibility, but is also more prone to tripping over itself. The difference between the two is less now than it's ever been.
Which is better? Still your decision.
To reiterate points made in the original post, the hardware and software are both designed and built by Apple and therefore play very nicely together. There is no separate tower with the iMac, everything is contained in the monitor. A nice touch, but not unique to Macs. The monitor is a thing of beauty and looks very nice on a desk. The keyboard and trackpad are very well built. So far, so good.
The ordering process gave an interesting insight into Apple's pricing. To add 4GB of memory on top of the 4GB already provided would have added an extra £160 on to the price-tag. Having set the iMac up, we sourced an extra 8GB of memory from Crucial for less than £35. It may be true that Apple makes good quality products, but don't be under illusion about how they have made the phenomenal amounts of money they have.
OSX, the operating system installed on all Macs, is very nice. Not spectacular, not life-changing, but very nice. Most things you can do on Windows you can do on OSX. Some slightly different methods have to be learnt but no show-stoppers. OSX seems to come with more software pre-installed than Windows, including iMovie and Garageband which are great fun and add to the glossy reputation that Apple products have. The vast majority of programs that I used on Windows have equivalents on the Mac. Most are identical as Macs are mainstream enough for companies to write for. Occasionally you have to go looking for third-party equivalents but again, no show-stoppers. In a worst case, it is possible to install Windows on a Mac, either in its own partition completely separately from OSX, or within it using virtualization software like VirtualBox which works brilliantly. However, if you don't have to, don't. A friend of mine said it was 'like putting a Metro dashboard into an Aston Martin.' Harsh, but it would certainly take up unnecessary space.
At this point it's worth pointing out that not everything went smoothly in the transition. The scanner on the multi-function printer didn't work straight away and is still flaky. And OSX would not perform a Software Update for the first 48 hours. A lot of research later and things were still not resolved until one morning it just started working. I take it the issue lay with Apple's servers but who knows. It was a valuable lesson in the fact that things don't always 'just work'.
So the conclusion? Pretty much what it was - it's all about what you want the machine to do. The Apple range is slick, but not perfect. Windows offers a little more range and flexibility, but is also more prone to tripping over itself. The difference between the two is less now than it's ever been.
Which is better? Still your decision.
Thursday, 29 March 2012
Join hands in line...
Having spent most of the morning in a horrendous spiral of impending doom, I thought it was about time to share a simple yet effective solution to remote desktop sharing.
One of the biggest difficulties any IT department will face is having a competent enough user on the other end of the phone who can navigate around a PC efficiently enough and follow instructions correctly so as to do as instructed. For the most part, most issues can be resolved over the phone, but if the call is destined to go on for longer than 5-10 minutes, the user will only get frustrated and want to hand off the controls to somebody who knows what they are doing.
Having faced this issue this morning we tried to establish a remote session using Microsoft's built in "Remote Assistance". Sadly because of intervening unchangeable firewalls, the session wouldn't start or connect and so that option was abandoned.
Next option was to try the free session called "LogMeIn" which uses the Hamachi networking system. The Free pro client looked very impressive, but it required some intricate installation procedures to install the software on the client machine, and we test this locally before subjecting our disheartened subject with the ordeal.. and between us in the IT Dept we felt it was too complicated to talk through over the phone and thus disbanded that option too.
We tried MSN Messenger, in the hope that the remote desktop session could piggy back on the Messenger ports, and were faced with countless "updates" required by Windows Live and a confusing collection of (pointless) add on's to the chat system before it would connect.. so again this was abandoned.
Finally we discovered a simple and, more importantly, FREE system from a web site called "See My PC" and it gave us the following link for downloading a small file for running. http://showmypc.com/remote-support.html?p=1#fragment-1
Upon downloading the EXE, it sat quietly until needed, didn't require installing and ran as a stand alone program. The client simply clicked on "Show My PC Now" and ensured that the "Give full control to users" was ticked, and it gave them a secure password to give to us to allow us to connect remotely. It ran and connected in under 30 seconds and we were able to resolve the system quickly.
If you have had experience where you needed help remotely, and an IT Guru was able to assist you, what program did they use? Let us know how that experience went...
One of the biggest difficulties any IT department will face is having a competent enough user on the other end of the phone who can navigate around a PC efficiently enough and follow instructions correctly so as to do as instructed. For the most part, most issues can be resolved over the phone, but if the call is destined to go on for longer than 5-10 minutes, the user will only get frustrated and want to hand off the controls to somebody who knows what they are doing.
Having faced this issue this morning we tried to establish a remote session using Microsoft's built in "Remote Assistance". Sadly because of intervening unchangeable firewalls, the session wouldn't start or connect and so that option was abandoned.
Next option was to try the free session called "LogMeIn" which uses the Hamachi networking system. The Free pro client looked very impressive, but it required some intricate installation procedures to install the software on the client machine, and we test this locally before subjecting our disheartened subject with the ordeal.. and between us in the IT Dept we felt it was too complicated to talk through over the phone and thus disbanded that option too.
We tried MSN Messenger, in the hope that the remote desktop session could piggy back on the Messenger ports, and were faced with countless "updates" required by Windows Live and a confusing collection of (pointless) add on's to the chat system before it would connect.. so again this was abandoned.
Finally we discovered a simple and, more importantly, FREE system from a web site called "See My PC" and it gave us the following link for downloading a small file for running. http://showmypc.com/remote-support.html?p=1#fragment-1
Upon downloading the EXE, it sat quietly until needed, didn't require installing and ran as a stand alone program. The client simply clicked on "Show My PC Now" and ensured that the "Give full control to users" was ticked, and it gave them a secure password to give to us to allow us to connect remotely. It ran and connected in under 30 seconds and we were able to resolve the system quickly.
If you have had experience where you needed help remotely, and an IT Guru was able to assist you, what program did they use? Let us know how that experience went...
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Backup Backup (And Give A Brother Room)
It's a 90s Will Smith reference, and it's a tune. No one? OK, moving on...
What would happen if your hard drive exploded right now? How much of your data would you be able to recover from other sources? If the answer is 'none', then we need to talk. Backup is another of those boring subjects that only becomes of interest the split second after it's too late to do anything about it. To save the aggravation, here's some best practice tips.
Firstly, choose your method of backup. The most straightforward is an external hard drive. They've dropped in price of recent times and you could now get a 1TB (over 1000GB) hard drive for under £80. Windows has some basic backup features built in, but you may find a bit more flexibility in third-party software. I can recommend SyncBack, but try some free demos and find out what works for you.
You may find some on-line solutions work well for you. We've talked about this previously in the context of cloud-computing, but let's refer specifically to email for a second.
For a long time, POP was the way to access your email. Post Office Protocol (no really) means the email is downloaded and kept locally on your computer. Great for offline access but not as useful if anything bad happens to your computer. It is possible to back up POP folders, but even better is to leave the email on your ISP's servers. The key expression to look up is IMAP and although we won't go into it now, it essentially means your computer and email servers stay in sync, while actually storing the emails safely with your email provider. If you lost your hard drive, you could re-download your entire email history on to a new computer.
A second consideration is regularity. Now technically once a year is regular. It rather depends on how much you use your computer as to how often you need to back up. A serious power user, including every business that uses a computer, should be backing up at least once a day. As a casual user your going to have to make a decision. After every session ask yourself what the impact would be if your computer disappeared overnight. If you would consider it disastrous because of the lose of data, then it's time to backup.
Backing up is not optional for any serious - or regularly casual - computer user. There are a myriad methods to do it, all you have to do is do it. And I don't want to worry you, but can I smell something burning?
What would happen if your hard drive exploded right now? How much of your data would you be able to recover from other sources? If the answer is 'none', then we need to talk. Backup is another of those boring subjects that only becomes of interest the split second after it's too late to do anything about it. To save the aggravation, here's some best practice tips.
Firstly, choose your method of backup. The most straightforward is an external hard drive. They've dropped in price of recent times and you could now get a 1TB (over 1000GB) hard drive for under £80. Windows has some basic backup features built in, but you may find a bit more flexibility in third-party software. I can recommend SyncBack, but try some free demos and find out what works for you.
You may find some on-line solutions work well for you. We've talked about this previously in the context of cloud-computing, but let's refer specifically to email for a second.
For a long time, POP was the way to access your email. Post Office Protocol (no really) means the email is downloaded and kept locally on your computer. Great for offline access but not as useful if anything bad happens to your computer. It is possible to back up POP folders, but even better is to leave the email on your ISP's servers. The key expression to look up is IMAP and although we won't go into it now, it essentially means your computer and email servers stay in sync, while actually storing the emails safely with your email provider. If you lost your hard drive, you could re-download your entire email history on to a new computer.
A second consideration is regularity. Now technically once a year is regular. It rather depends on how much you use your computer as to how often you need to back up. A serious power user, including every business that uses a computer, should be backing up at least once a day. As a casual user your going to have to make a decision. After every session ask yourself what the impact would be if your computer disappeared overnight. If you would consider it disastrous because of the lose of data, then it's time to backup.
Backing up is not optional for any serious - or regularly casual - computer user. There are a myriad methods to do it, all you have to do is do it. And I don't want to worry you, but can I smell something burning?
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